I am a huge fan of a dead genre. Darkstar is good enough to satisfy some of those old school space sim cravings, plenty of solid action and a large variety of mission types to take part in. The dogfighting is genuinely fun, the controls and interface comfortable. If you want, you can be knee deep in combat with a cool looking, powerful ship in no time at all.
Just so you know, I was a huge fan of series like Freespace, Colony Wars, G-Police and the original pc release of Crimson Skies. These were story based, action intensive dogfighting sims on both consoles and pc's. Most of them were also military and team based shooters, so I'm less into the mercenary approach. In addition I'm not so into the super specialized, economic oriented sims that trickle out of developers these days. Unfortunately I got into the genre too late for Wing Commander and X-Wing, but if anyone made a sequel to any of those series, I'd be more than a little excited.
Given my tastes, the relative lack of competition, and the GOG pricetag Darkstar one is a very good game of a style I sincerely want to see more of. It might suffer in comparison to one of my old time favorites, but as things stand its an exciting and fun game to play.