I've only played about 2-3 hours so far. My overall impression is that It has some potential but I have a lot of minor gripes.
First, the good things: It's early access launch day, and the game is playable with over 100 players in a server, which is honestly an accomplishment by itself. You can hop right in and shoot at things, and there is a decent mix of small and capital ships to play with. This genre has had so few examples in the past 15 years that just the fact that it exists at all makes me happy.
There are some things that could be improved though.
Controlling your ship is complex (especially the capitals), and there is basically no new player experience in game. You need to read the faq and ask questions in the Discord to figure out how things work. It took me almost half an hour to figure out how to drop mines from a destroyer, for example (Bring up the "V" ring menu, select the top right option for Mine launcher). You have to use ring menus for a lot of things like switching from missiles to torpedoes as well. They pushed a patch that updated the default key for missiles from right ctrl to middle mouse, but didn't update the in-game help screen. I can't tell visually when my missiles have locked on so I have to rely on the beeping sound.
You can destroy subsystems on caps and stations (like weapons), but you can't target them, which makes shooting them tricky. The aim assist cursor on your guns will just point to the center of the capship or station, which is a bigger problem than you might think. With Newtonian flight control and shots that keep your momentum, the aim assist cursor is a necessity. If you want to use missiles to target subsystems, you have to manually disable the missile lock safety (ring menu again), untarget everything (backspace), and then dumbfire your missiles.
The game really benefits from good team coordination, and the devs have provided a discord server that you can use to have voice comms with your teammates. But it's totally manual. You have to pick a team in game, remember which team you picked, and then join the right channel in discord. Right now, there are over 100 players in game but only 10 of them are in the public discord with voice chat on (although others might be on private servers). If I was still in college and had a group of friends that I could game with it would be cooler, even a squad of 3-4 players seems viable to tackle the AI. The game gets boring pretty quick if you are just playing by yourself.
Performance wise, I'm using a Radeon RX 460 with only 2GB of VRAM, which is below the minimum requirements for this game. However, it's playable with all graphics turned to low setting and a 1080P resolution. I
think it generally runs at 30fps for me but I don't totally understand the in game frame counter.
I'm a little worried that with no long term progression system a game like this will die out due to lack of players, but there are decent numbers in game for now.
Overall, my other gripe is that it feels like I need to use a capital ship to really make an impact on any of the mission objectives, but piloting a capitol is a bit slow and less exciting. A few bombers escorted by a corvette might be a viable way to make an impact with small ships, but I'm too shy and don't know enough friends interested in the game to put together a squadron like that.
Edit: typos
