Like others have said, the universe feels very empty, and it is quite obvious that it is procedurally generated.

Every distress call is just a random chore equivalent to janitor duty, salvage is just a pile of fuel/fruit floating on a small platform. Every planet is the same.

The repetitiveness hits long before you get your second cargo upgrade, and it makes it really feel like a soulless game, instead of an immersive universe.

"Procedurally Generated" is often marketed as "infinite replayability", but that's only true if you spent as much effort on the generation logic as you would have making 100 unique planets.. which they clearly did not.
I couldn't get through my first playthrough in such a lifeless universe.
While the game isn't marked as early access, it does seem to have a regular flow of updates happening, including decently sized ones.

I plan to keep an eye on this one and will update my review as new features drop!

Writing a negative review can be tricky. This game has a lot to offer and the premise of it, space trucker trucking through space, is one with exceptional potential. Furthermore, this game has a well written story with well written characters, but the gameplay feels poorly designed and under tested and as such tarnishes that work to produce something that is more frustrating than fun.

The plot is pretty good. I would even go so far as to say that the plot was the thing driving my playtime with the game for the latter half. Whilst not wishing to spoil anything, I can say that the narrative is compelling (at least to the point I got to) and the characters are well enough written to keep you engaged. The game makes the interesting decision to restrict you to only following one characters narrative at a time and whilst this does help you focus on one story, it ultimately does not gel with the exploration this game otherwise encourages. Furthermore the main plot is frequently locked behind a muck around quota, which brings us neatly to the gameplay.

The graphics are both pretty and effective for communicating the mechanics of the game. However the tedium of every aspect of the game, from moving crates to running around the ship to repair things, outlasts its welcome well into the game. Furthermore, depending on the point you are at in the game, it either takes way too long to get anywhere or way to short. Making the galaxy smaller would have certainly helped as a lot of the systems feel barren and useless. Repairing also runs into the dilemma of whether or not to use the icons that tell you where the ship is damaged. Leaving them on, near the beginning of the game, I found that there was very little of interest in the repair system, as the game just became one of following the icons. But turning them off ultimately lead to my giving up on the game. Let me detail it here: I went to warp my ship and found my ship was out of fuel; so I ran down to refuel; then I ran back up to warp my ship to find out the fuel injector was misaligned; so I ran back down and realigned the fuel injector; then I ran back up to warp my ship to find the warp rings were misaligned; then I quit the game. Whilst one could argue that this is what I get for turning the icons off, if I had left them on I would have quit 5 hours earlier. There are more things I could complain about (I hate loading and unloading with a passion), but unfortunately steam has a character limit.

So there an excellent game with, might I add, truly astounding music, however I cannot in good conscience recommend a game that, even with a good story carrying it, I could not finish due to the endless frustration of its gameplay.

Easy-going, cozy game about being a space long-haul trucker. Yes, it does get a bit repetitive but I loved playing it in chunks.