Frustratingly hard, yet strangely compelling
The adventure is shaped into a combination of small minigames. As your ship moves towards the next system you will face two or three encounters along the way. You control your spaceship from a top down perspective in a full 360 scrolling environment, and trade fire with asteroids, pirates and the like. As you arrive at the destination planet you will guide the smaller landing craft past a large creature and avoid hostile attacks while you find the landing zone. Finally, after landing, you control a crew member who has to fight his way through a gauntlet of enemies before entering the trade center.
Inside the trade center you can sell off any loot you have taken from attacking ships, and trade them for better weapons and equipment. You can also log in to a navigation computer from where you can plan your next move to an adjacent planet, setting the departure date to optimize the cost for fuel versus the cost for lodging at the planet surface. Money is scarce, and accepting the wrong cargo contract or spending too much will leave you stranded at a planet with no choice but to restart a new game.
The spaceflight part is the most worked through section and is also the most enjoyable. Before entering an encounter you can tweak the power allocation to the ships shields and weapons, and you can also equip a weapon of choice. During the engagement you also have to watch out for opportunities to scavenge extra fuel. All the other action sequences are drab and uninteresting in comparison and I feel they could have been omitted without taking away from the experience.