Somewhere between Diablo and The Last Federation. Fly around killing generic pirates for a while, collect loot, and then eventually aid one of the factions. In the background, all the factions are playing a mini-4x game that you can influence by completing quests or just massacring the faction fleets. These factions research and improve where you can't, so picking the one making the parts you want for your ship is an interesting "specialization" choice with real ramifications and investment.

My main issues with it are it's ugly as orange piss and very stingy on bag space at the beginning. As such you have to push through the bad early game to start getting to the fun stuff. But once it clicks it's quite enjoyable!