I'll start off by admitting to only playing 4-5 missions, but the game so far has been enjoyable and I understand the general mechanics. The game starts with some... interesting cutscenes filling you in on some backstory if you care to watch them though the voice acting seemed a bit bizarre. I recommend playing through the tutorial since it's really short and fills you in on all you need to know, which isn't very much as playing the game is super easy.
You are the commander of a carrier, the Star Wolf, that can fire some pretty big guns but mostly just deploys fighters to battle pirates and other foes. You select a starting mission after choosing your fighters load out from some weak equipment stored in your carrier, and off into space you go. Despite it's appearance the game isn't a "roam the galaxy freely doing as you please" kind of game. Selecting a mission will bring your carrier right into the relevant system (which are thankfully not so big as to make travelling through them tedious). From there you can fly around and blow up whatever you want, so in a sense each mission is a sandbox-lite type of affair, but mostly you will just go to your objectives and fend off attacks from roaming Bad Guys. The missions so far have been pretty entertaining, and after each one you can choose your next mission from a set of about 2-5 (from what I've seen so far), but once you pick one from that set you can't go back and do the others. Again, this is just from about an hour or two of playing so that may change later in the game.
Blowing up ships and starbases yields some nice loot in the form of weapons, systems (support stuff like ECM or afterburners), or even empty fighters that you can collect and immediately equip mid-mission. This feature is pretty cool as any fighters you have docked on the carrier can be re-fitted and re-armed on the fly. They are also repaired slowly while back on the carrier. I have yet to discover if this loot is randomly decided or pre-set as I'm only on my first playthrough but if anybody knows please leave a comment.
The Star Wolf is your home base. Your fighters can be destroyed and the pilots recovered to fly another day, but if this thing blows up it's game over. With 4 huge gun slots and 5 system slots she is a pretty powerful beast, but the large guns you start with can only hit fighters somewhat reliably at close range (hence the need for well equipped fighters of your own). Having the Star Wolf open up on an enemy capital ship while your little interceptors pick off fighters and bombers is pretty damn cool, and made even better by the ability to pause and zoom in super close, or out super far.
Fighter pilots can be customized by assigning their earned experience to a variety of skill branches such as Gunnery(cannons,lasers), Missiles, Piloting, etc. The further you advance down a branch the more expensive it becomes and there's about 2-3 choices per tier, so choosing a direction for your pilot early on is essential. Advancing through these branches seems to offer real benefit and is just not fluff. Level 2 Gunner gives you a +20% to hit for example, and doesn't cost much experience.
The controls are simple and straightforward, the interface is clear and concise, and the camera works wonderfully. Those screenshots make it look kinda cluttered and confusing, but the graphics are really clean and nice. Space looks fantastic and the ships are detailed.
The time it takes to cross a system is so miniscule that I really don't know where the complaint in the last review comes from. They are small enough to cross in a matter of seconds, especially on 4x speed, which you should be using as encountering an enemy auto-pauses the game. You would really have to be searching hard for nits to pick if you list that as a gameplay issue.
What more can I say? Probably a lot since I apparently love typing... Anyway, the game is fun and looks great! It's not a huge space sandbox game, but it's definitely a fun Space RPG that I think everyone should try if they like one or both of those things.