This is a fantastic game. It has a central story line you can follow which is pretty interesting, you play as a member of the Republic (no not the Star Wars Republic before anyone asks lol). You make your captain, customise your look, choose from a selection of starting ships and thier loadout, choose your emblem, name your ship and your captain and away you go. The games universe has many contracts and side events to discover and is fairly expansive.

The game has a fairly good progression but not overly expansive system, not just for you the captain, but also your crewmen and women gaining skill points for the crew even medals which add passive little bonuses.
Your ships has a fixed number of slots for weapons (red slots) and devices (blue slots). these you can buy, earn, loot or craft (if you learn the blueprints) and all of them can be upgraded.
The game has a crafting system which requires components which you get from scrapping things to break them down, you can also find and earn components in other ways like missions, events and loot. It also has a research system whereby you can attempt to learn any blueprints you may have, which if successful allows you to craft them as previously mentioned.
Ship combat is not super complex but is great fun and visually reminds me a lot of how space combat looked and felt in the Expanse tv show. The ships themselves all look really good and that is not something many space games can say sadly.
Also as mentioned there are events sometimes while travelling or going to a POIn events will happen these are narrative, sometimes involving your crew, sometimes not and read a lot like choose your own adventures, with choices and in places dice rolls. Your skills and stats determine how many dice and the difficulty of the tasks it is very tabletop RPG feeling and something I like a lot. You can even have ground combat between your crew and who or whatever and these involve dicerolls and consumables which can give various eeffects like extra attacks, heals and defences added to character etc..

All in all this is a fantastic title, that is well worth the very reasonable price and I highly recommend it.

Oh and if you really want to get into the story, be sure to play the prologue before starting a campaign, it sets the secene for everything main storywise.

Thank god I don't have to play as that insufferable girl boss from the prologue.
Writing is terrible, voice acting is dreadful and story is so far cliched.