Tutorial has been God awful.

First I had to turn off the voice volume - The voice actor sounded as if he was mumbling quietly from inside a tin can with a mouthful of crackers.

And it's hard to keep up with reading the tutorial. Also bugs have made the tutorial lectures repeat themselves or get stuck on screen at times and hiding other info that I'm trying to look at.

The tutorial is pretty lengthy and no auto-save during it. While struggling with the tutorial instructions and the interface I got wiped out by the first practice platform that fights back.

And I'm really not sitting through the whole thing to get back up to that point again.

The camera sometimes lets go of the ship (I'm hoping that I can find a way to manually correct the camera with keyboard when this happens but haven't studied the game's manual yet) and getting around becomes real disorienting.

I was hoping for another Nexus but this tries to do what Nexus did at the same time using fast paced arcade controls - Not a good combo so far.

One thing I will say is that there is a lot of variation in game play when you consider you can mine asteroids, upgrade your ship and board and attack other ships.

Also have been experiencing occasional crashes attempting to get the game to run and I'm pretty sure it's the game and not my PC.

Steam Daily Deal? I gave it a pass when saw the 46 Metacritic score. Not that Metacritic is always reliable, of course, but you're not making me regret my choice.

It's hard to go by Metacritic unless it's obviously bad like 8 different reviewers dropped it below a 30% rating.

With a lot of reviews often times the reviewer didn't take the right approach or felt that it required too much elbow grease to be enjoyable - certain things I can usually compensate for personally.

So far, however, this feels like it should still be in Desura's Alpha section.

I think the main thing that is making it look so tacky is that the voice acting appears to be a place holder that never got filled and the localization has kinda cheapened the polish.

I hope not but this might turn out to be White Gold in space.

I've almost bought this game several times... kind of glad I passed. Thanks for the "review". I trust people on here more than elsewhere.

I've had a chance to invest some more time into this game (impossible to play enough to provide a solid recommendation before the Steam sale ended).

The DLC that Steam released for this game fixed the crashing issues and some of the bugginess involving the dialogue with the NPCs.

Some information windows can still get in the way of dialogue causing you to miss some of it if you have the info windows open at the wrong time but, outside of main scripted events, the NPCs now wait for you to click before proceeding their conversations.

What really urked me was the tutorial - I would HIGHLY suggest not running the tutorial and instead reading the PDF manual that Steam provides in the game's main directory.
The one bit about the tutorial that pissed me off the most was that the tutor made me restart the whole tutorial again for not following directions right away (I was messing with graphics settings and such).

So now having experienced more of the game I can easily recommend it if you can find it including its DLC for $12.50 or less.

Just note that you're going to want to leave character voices turned all the way down completely and just resort to reading.
It's not a prejudice or bias against Indian accents it's just that they can sometimes squabble up English on top of which the dialogue is spoken too fast and poorly recorded. I'm pretty sure the developers implemented themselves as placeholders but were never able to enlist professional voice actors.

The game is very similar to Dark Star One but can really only be played with mouse and keyboard which, ironically, offers better control over the ship than Dark Star One did with a game pad.

It also has a challenging yet fair balance to difficulty as opposed to DSO which threw both cops and crims up your butt in droves (like GTA Vice City) without mercy if you accidentally farted the wrong way.

I also bought the game after the second DLC and never had any technical problem. Game itself is rather interesting, good fast combat, variety of ships and lots of stuff to do like trading, exploring huge universe, picking on pirates or regular military ( not advised unless you operate a mighty class ship ). Even better, sequel was announced recently and full 3D is promised as well as many other improvements...Sounds great to me, just not sure when the release is supposed to happen...