Wrote a Steam review of this game. Had to give it a negative.

Game design will only appeal to a few. There's no speed control during flight and no radar minimap. Outside flight, you can take ships that use energy weapons (free ammo) or ballistic/missile (costly ammo), but for economy you don't want to take missions that require that ammo. Flight doesn't feel compelling as you can't maneuver well and you feel constrained not to use ammo weapons. I've read missions get harder if you bring more ships, plus you have to pay fuel or docking costs for more ships while your mission payouts don't really increase. So you don't really want to spend money on more ships. But there's also not much to do with money other than buy supplies and ammo. So you have uncompelling flight gameplay plus uncompelling economic gameplay.

On the plus side, game looks and runs well. They really did a nice job with very limited assets, it's just the gameplay has such narrow appeal.

1) Flight gameplay - it's not just lack of speed control, lack of radar, and being discouraged to use ammo weapons (which is basically all the fun weapons). It's also the auto-lock on, the auto-avoid-obstacles (which doesn't always strictly work), the limited waves (you might fight 40 ships but only 8 or 12 at a time).

The flight gameplay is just repetitive because you don't need to make a significant decisions during gameflight. It's the same thing over and over, throw in some capital ships but then you switch to your bomber or heavy fighter, rinse and repeat.

2) Economic gameplay - okay, you buy supplies and run cargo and select missions. Nice starter. But let's say the game gets harder the more ships you bring. That's what I've read and I think it may be true, and apparently you don't get different mission access if you have a huge armada, nor do you get higher rewards, but you do have to pay for fuel and/or docking. Then too, there's nothing to do with cash other than repairs, ammo, cargo. You can buy spacedocks and stuff but that's just a "numbers" thing - it doesn't require interactivity, it's just your money piles up then you have someplace you can stick it, as far as I know you don't lock anything *particularly* unique with each station purchase (unless you count building a supply line as unique but it feels lackluster to me).

3) The game works against itself in a lot of ways. Okay so there's ammo that you have to pay for, sounds like that could be fun and interesting, you're a privateer. But your margins are tight enough that you don't *want* to use ammo. Okay so you can buy more ships and better weapons but that just increases docking and fuel costs and your mission payouts don't increase so again you don't *want* to get a lot of fleet. There's an auto-lock-on with weapons but being forced to fly at one speed means you have difficulty focusing on a single target (particularly capital ship turrets that require you to keep looping around, but also other targets).

The game looks nice and runs smoothly but that isn't all there is to games. I know it's a free-to-play game but it really does feel like just so minimal features were put on (though well executed), then a shop with some stuff and that's it. I don't know that putting more work into the game would have a good cost-benefit ratio, but if players are quitting before getting out of the first system in campaign (like I did) then perhaps they're not really compelled to spend money on something they're not playing.

(Note: I did three plays of the first campaign, quitting before exiting the system in each game. Why restart? You buy a ship for a big chunk of money but if you want to switch a ship out you get very little money back. So it's really just easier to restart the game. So there was my initial blind playthrough (was okay but I didn't like the plain fighter I chose and my economy was pretty tight - though I had money from story missions there wasn't enough to just play around and switch up ships). Second playthrough, I used story mission rewards to fund a big cargo ship which ended up being near useless as there's no in-game way to *EASILY* calculate optimal cargos and though I could do it with pencil and paper or keeping a spreadsheet in an application and alt-tabbing out, heck with that. Third playthrough I read I could try out a heavy fighter with railgun to take out capital ships, but that felt unsatisfying what with the minimal speed required plus the non-ammo weapon loadout was a bit light for my taste. Then I quit, because far as I read and as far as I'd seen I'd never break the essential loop where you're getting economically throttled so you're pushed to make better economic decisions which means a pared-down fleet with minimal use of ammo-based weapons and selecting missions that didn't require using ammo, then it's just killing 20 ships or so every flight while never really being in any danger it's just lock on, blow up, rinse and repeat.)

*btw I played a load of Wing Commander. The entire series, including the Privateer games. So maybe my bar is a little high.