I see why people like this game so much but I think it doesn't leave up to its promise. After a few levels it starts to feel like the only interesting and/or challenging thing to do was exploring. The problem solving itself is trivial. I never ran out of healing, ammo, hacking thingies or lockpicks, so the game just became find the way forward and spend whatever you had to spend to get there. Halfway through I just started shooting all the enemies because I just wanted to get it over with.
That said, the way it makes you explore the levels and figure out where you are, what you need to do and where you need to go is almost unparalleled (even if there are some dogshit levels, mostly in the second half). Honestly it says a lot about how little progress there's been that this 20 year old game holds up as well as it does.
The story is very interesting too, it's a shame that some people will miss the point because of some unlucky coincidences that happened on those 20 years. My advice would be to treat the worldbuilding as it was: "what if all the conspiracies are true?". And not as an endorsement of any of them but especially not the more unsavory ones that appeared after it was released.

It's a peaceful and laid-back kind of industry/crafting/management/whatever game. The crafting UX is one of the worst I've ever seen and the exploration aspect is extremely limited for a "space exploration" game. Once you fully explore one planet you've basically seen all of them. The only thing that changes is the terrain generation itself, which does give every planet a unique visual feel and a somewhat unique way to be traversed. But in terms of what you're actually doing, which is collecting resources and building a factory, every planet is exactly the same. The only thing that changes is the color and name of whatever resource is semi-unique to that planet.
I'm still giving it a 3/5 because that one thing you do is very fun and all the little toys you get to build along the way are fun to play with too. It's a shame that they're basically useless outside of some fetch-quest.

I'm gonna go ahead and say that I completed it even though my brother blew up our very important item storage and may or may not have bricked our save, shortly before stranding us somewhere else by clipping our ship into the void.
I don't get why people say this game is good with friends. Maybe we were playing it wrong, but to me it feels like it would be the perfect game to play while listening to a podcast or music or some random 3 hour long video essay.