TLDR: The game has a lot of potential for fun if you want to explore, get into spaceship fights, or truck millions of tons of goods through space, but many aspects of the game are either lacking in depth or extremely difficult to learn without guides and extensive research, and all of it is extremely grindy, often to a frustrating degree.
TLDR over, more ranty details below.
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There's a lot to like about this game, but there's also just a massive amount of padding that makes.. achieving most things in the game feel extremely tedious.
If you don't really care about min-maxing and just wanna wander around in a huge sandbox, it's pretty interesting to poke at planets and explore the galaxy, and the game's visuals and sense of scale can be awe-inspiring even despite its age. You really feel the scale of the galaxy with how long it takes to do things, which is... not a good thing for anything besides exploration and roleplaying as a deep-space scientist and trailblazer. (Those are fun, though admittedly shallow gameplay loops.)
However doing basically anything beyond that usually requires knowledge that the game doesn't provide reasonable ways to discover. You are either reading guides, wiki-diving, and installing a half-dozen add-ons, or you will spend days to weeks figuring out relatively basic things.
Rewards for most content in the game are pitiful, and upgrading and redesigning your loadouts for ships and personal gear is satisfying but EXTREMELY time-consuming, even with optimal strategies. Many ships in the game don't serve a purpose once you compare their stats to others in the same category, and many gameplay loops also serve no purpose once you realize how poor their rewards are for the time spent on them. This is doubly true for many older ships or gameplay loops that have been obsoleted, but not had their acquisition requirements reduced.
Many elements of the game that aren't just, the flight model and space combat are extremely underdeveloped, or when they are developed, obfuscated to a degree that requires an amount of research to even begin to understand them. The BGS and powerplay are such examples, and the developers intend for both of them to be some of the primary factors driving gameplay. If you are a new player, most of the information the game gives you is either useless or requires dedicated note-taking and research to make sense of. Much of the information presented in the UI is either unclear or simply wrong. The purpose and use-case for most of the ship modules or upgrades in the game is unclear without extensive experimentation.
Everything attached to the Odyssey DLC is frequently buggy and unoptimized, and contains the most tedious grinds in the form of suit and weapon upgrades. But it's also where the developers place all the most overpowered ships, all of the most lucrative and easiest game loops, and now, end-game "raids" in the form of operations, which appeared promising until they released in a bare-bones, if modestly functional state.
The game's "story" is delivered in semi-regular news updates about whatever is currently happening in the galaxy, but there is very little opportunity to engage with it or the characters presented within it, even when they are ostensibly part of systems you can interact with mechanically.
Flying a ship is satisfying. Learning to dock or land, take off and approach different types of stations and planets is satisfying. Ship combat is satisfying, but... heavily decided by how much time you are willing to devote to grinding upgrades. A fully upgraded ship utterly trivializes most enemies, and higher level enemies just have bigger numbers, not more complex tactics or maneuverability that might push you to improve your flying.
Ground combat is a joke. It is at best a mediocre FPS from two decades ago when it works properly, and even most FPSes released back then make it look plain and uninteresting. Again, higher level enemies just sponge bullets harder and there's no real tactics or strategy to fighting them besides just grinding more upgrades for your gear. The developers suggested that players might want to specialize into "roles" for the operations update, but there is no such thing as roles when the only option is to throw out as much damage as possible. There is no room for tactical play or support, or even objectives to juggle or maintain while fighting the extremely plain enemies. There are effectively two enemy types for ground: a drone that sometimes defends settlements, and man with gun, which comprises the ENTIRETY of all operations combat and ground-combat related activities. It's not.. unfun, after you've gotten most of the upgrades if you just want to run around and click on the same enemy over and over again, but the lack of ability to specialize or meaningfully alter how you interact with it leaves the ground combat a forgettable filler activity at best.
All of the other ground-based activities are even more underdeveloped. Cataloging alien life for money sounds exciting, but consists of flying to a planet and wandering around the surface before you hold left-click on a plant for five seconds. Even the pay-2-win "Nomad" designed explicitly for this purpose just makes it faster to reduce the time spent on each barren planet. Searching planets for crash sites and salvage opportunities is neat in concept, but extremely simplistic in execution and offers little in the way of rewards. The stealth mechanics for ground missions are almost.. something, but are extremely rudimentary and often can be ignored. Stealing someone's security clearance is a neat idea, but only necessary if you fully commit to bloodless missions, which are... slow, and difficult to do consistently, to say the least. NPC behaviors are rudimentary but somewhat unpredictable at times, which makes simply stealth-killing the entire settlement the more reliable solution.
Also like, why does the game automatically assign bounties and such to you for stealth kills and performing illegal activities that have no witnesses? Crime in general is often... more annoying to do than doing legal activities, and carries little to no reward, which makes the frequency of activities in the game that suggest or require crime seem... strange and ill-conceived. If the argument is that it's the future and a person's corpse can automatically report their murder instantly to the entire galaxy, why isn't there... literally any way to work around that? A way to jam someone's communications to isolate them before an assassination attempt. This applies to space combat too, though players have found ways to push NPCs out into isolated areas where they can do all the murder they please. Also, pretty much any crime in any ground-based content will provoke NPCs into executing you on the spot, despite many settlements having functioning prison cells and such.
Final complaint I guess. Many of the more advanced ways to disable or disorient or otherwise do anything besides direct damage to NPC ships just.. don't apply to NPCs at all and are purely relegated to PvP in a game where you are unlikely to have regular PvP encounters. (There's no real reward for PvP besides possibly the fun of combat, so.. there's not much reason to interact with other players.)
