Read danny_maland's review (most helpful) to contrast with this. Similar points, he barely gave a thumbs down, I barely give a thumbs up.

TL;DR: Spacy. Combines elements for a story above its price. Gameplay gets more challenging and more complex as the game progresses. About 20 total ship types in game between two factions. Many bugs. No voiceovers. If they had more time or budget, this could have rivalled Homeworld.

Longer version, but I'll try to keep points short.

Story guy did his/her job (too lazy to look up credits). People have personalities. The world has politics. Everybody has a motive for their actions. Story in a game is important to me; this one shows a world.

Graphics did their job. Limited number of ships, but they look nice. Weapons are visible and are indicated when changing firing behavior. Worked well with story team: one station looks like a giant ship, fleet admiralty intended it that way.

Combat designers did their job. We-go/turned based system that plays out in real-time where you can review the previous turn with no loading delays. Movement indicators similar to recent XCOM games, they look nice. Turret firing arc indicators optional. Most turrets have the same range; damage and accuracy determine target priorities. Multi-mission chapters (can repair ships between missions, can only rearm ammo between chapters) is a sweet-sweet idea implemented well. Ships have a limited veterancy system, which benefits keeping ships alive. Requested reinforcements can show up mid-battle if they're small ships, which is nice to see happen. Qualms: can't target sentient mines (bigger than the smallest ship and very slow); no ship has overlapping turret arcs; targeted firing mode causes all turrets to hold fire unless firing on the target (contrast: autofire ships can hit as many targets as the ship has guns); sprayer acid clouds are numerous enough to blanket large amounts of the battlefield in late game missions; some missions give an escort objective, then order you to kill everything anyway (making it easier to ignore escort objectives); war score might be based mostly on ship energy distribution, making defensive scores a chore to obtain; enemies can sit still, while player ships cannot; nautalid(enemy) corpses can be so numerous that maneuver becomes unnecessarily difficult toward the end-game. Small points, but numerous. Would have preferred a few missions fighting alongside allies. That's personal preference though. Interface is a bit clunky/complex for some; I found it okay.

QA did not do their job. There are many bugs that are the make-or-break issues for many players. Final mission attempt 2 of 3: enemy monarch corpse drifted out of battlefield, enemies rallied at the corpse and made the fight very long, then 2 enemies left, killed one, the turn never ended, I had to restart. Clicking on crew skills button while a mission briefing is open will cause mission selection icons to disappear (solution: exit to main menu and resume, no loading time so it's superfast). Achievements are bugged; gone through the game twice and haven't gotten basic achievements for getting crew members. Ships will (as best I can tell) spontaneously hold fire, meaning they won't fire on enemies until you notice and change their fire orders. Acid spray area of effect may be much larger than the graphic; noticed ships with substantial space between them and the nearest stream still suffered ill effects.

The game's design allows for a lot of meta-game. You can dismiss corvettes with empty missile racks and request another corvette as reinforcement, and the corvette will show up mid-battle with full ammo. Reinforcements can also be used to go over the ship limit; dismiss the reinforcements before the next battle and request new ones to go over the limit in the next fight. Well-timed countermeasure launches can destroy up to 4 missiles, instead of just 1 (though this might be intentional); if well-placed, the countermeasures can also cause missile AOE to damage enemies. While a challenge, sprayer streams (temporarily degrade shields) and missiles can be baited and tricked with good raider maneuvers. Allied missiles can unfortunately hit allies; enemy missiles can be tricked into enemies. There are probably a lot of options I'm missing.

Personal idea: would have been nice for some mercenary work. Corporations pay for responding to distress beacons, personal rewards for securing a certain number of transports, recovering a certain amount of information, holding off an enemy for a certain amount of time, or destroying a certain number of enemies. Use that money to purchase a capital ship and pay for upgrades: armor, power core, engine and weapon tuning, more missile space, more powerful missiles, etc. The in-game greed factor would have helped longevity.

Unfortunately, the game's kind of dead. Steamspy says there is an average of 1 player at any given time. The last forum post was 6 weeks ago. Doubt there'd be any improvement, since there'd be almost no money to be made. [Edit: two weeks later and 0 ratings on the review. Sad because it's a game that at least deserves the attention.]

Despite the issues, the gameplay and story get the game a thumbs up.

It's... okay. The total lack of ship customization is appalling. In a game like this I just can't imagine how any design team could arrive at the decision to not include it yet include a basically meangingless and bugged "crew" system that really is pointless. Can't really select your ships before battle either. It's basically an illusion of choice for what little there is. Upgrading is slow, for what little there is. It has some randomness to it, will you have a dozen missiles this mission or just a few? Who knows how that is figured internally. There's little to no strategy to the game. Yet is heavily tactics based. The basis of the game is maneouvering your ship properly, keeping firing arcs aimed and anticipating the enemy ship's movements. You're not going to out maneouver a small frigate with a destroyer for example. It's at decent enough game on sale. But in my opinion, even for people who enjoy this sort of game it's not worth $20. It just oozes a rushed product pushed out by it's publisher despite not having halff of it's features implemented properly or at all. Slitherine is usually not a dev that does this but I feel like that's probably what happened here. It's just a bare bones game, it can be enjoyable, especially after a hard fought battle but I don't know if that's enough to carry it. I'd sitll recommend it for tactical buffs if it's on sale for 50%

Exellent tactical sim, encourages a diverse fleet make up due to the special abilities, and makes you think about when to employ them with limited availability while not feeling stingy about how many missiles and decoys you get.
Not much of an RPG as the ships don't actually recieve any real upgrades and the crew development isn't major, but nice added layer on top and doesn't detract from anything else.

Campaign is a little short, but replaying it with a different approach and different decisions will give quite a different experience. The decisions taken in the campaign feel very meaningful.

Boring... there's nothing to this game. No real substance. You have no real control over anything but turning your ships and setting their fire mode. Where's the strategy, upgrades, storyline, etc... No thanks. Probably won't play this much unless I need a brain drain afternoon where I don't have to think

This is truely a great game. I hope they take it to the next level. An open world galaxy map with conquerable star systems. Build outposts, prepare your fleet and take over the galaxy one system at a time. I'd gladly pay the price of this game again for an addon like that. it would make this game better than most major titles of this type on the market today. They got the space combat right, now lets go for the stars.

Gladly recommended.
Thank you.

will update(/create) my review as i progress through the game.

Initial thoughts, wow.

First battle where i had a spaceship equipped with EMP/Stun gun, stunned an enemy, and it careened into the side of my capital ship, blowing itself up and damaging my shields. Then i managed to send an enemy careening into an asteroid :P.

As for gameplay, nothing too stunning.

Shipwise:
shielding on the ships in all 6 major zones (think cube faces).
power management systems which visibly change how the ships react (weapons=dmg done per shot, engines=speed, shielding=shield recharge rate) with a variable selection so you may divert all power to a zone, or some to each system.

Gameplay wise: only 6 missions into the game so cant comment fully on this aspect

I really wanted to like this game, but its too much of a mobile game.
Basically you move your ships, thats it and it bores pretty fast.
nice idea, but to simple, theres not much to do.

This game is one that i have been looking for an excedingly long time, This game is more dynamic then anything else. this is the type of command game that i am always on the hunt for. Facing the Nautilid or facing raiders the game dlivers a vibrant ship to ship universe.

Its xcom in space