It's a very well programmed game. The flight controls are fantastic, the combat is great, the difference in performance you get from upgrading your ship and buying new ships is immediately noticable and gives you motivation to progress. I like the way you start off in a piece of junk that handles like shit, and slowly build up your wealth to better equipment and faster, tougher ships.

The galaxy is huge. Like, ridiculously, disgustingly, obscenely huge. When you look at the star map and scroll outwards, you can spin the mouse wheel for ages and it just keeps zooming out with more and more stars in your field of view. It will make you laugh with disbelief it's so huge. I made it my quest to visit Earth, and it's taken me hours and hours to get even a small distance towards it, through hundreds of star systems, even though my starting position was relatively close to it.

HOWEVER the game seems to be held back by a bunch of people who think that games should be unnecessarily fiddly.

Like, the navigation system is purposely counter intuitive, you can't set waypoints from the mission screen you have to look at the destination, memorize it, and then go find it on the map. And when a lot of the star systems are called names like "Alrai Gamma 1057 B12" and "Alrai Gamma 1857 B12" it just adds artificial difficulty and forces you to squint at the screen to differentiate the often very similar names. What the fuck guys? I played Freelancer about 12 years ago and it had a much more user friendly nav system. You're telling me my spaceship can go faster than light but I can't even save waypoints in my navigation computer? Why does navigation have to be a chore? It just doesn't make sense.

You can't bookmark star systems, the manual waypoints are lost if you click on anything else, you can't make notes or save trade routes. There's no overarching storyline. The supply and demand tables are incomprehensible unless you read an internet tutorial. There aren't a massive range of ships to buy and there's not a lot of variety in their appearance.

Although there is a basic tutorial, it doesn't teach you much about the workings of the economy and the learning curve is very steep. The game dumps you in the deep end and forces you to learn by trial and error.

Once you get the hang of flying and navigating it's a lot easier and you start having fun, but to be honest it still feels like a very incomplete game. If you like figuring things out yourself and playing games that force you to get better, you'll probably like E:D. If you like games with lots of storyline, I'd recommend waiting until the devs get their act together.