Not Freelancer done right as the developer claims, but a Freelancer wantbe, and it doesn't really succeed at that.
At first glance the game looks great, the graphic looks much better than FL, but sometimes the frame rate can drop a lot during the middle of the battle or in the asteroid field.
The ship handling and customization is great, probably better than FL. And if you really want to make this game easy, just keep upgrading your ship’s Hull and get the best turrets. Turrets automatically targets enemy ships, with the full hull upgrade, 5 turrets loaded with the best weapon available you can be almost invincible, all you have to do is to afterburner toward the enemy formation while strafing to avoid fires. You will be racking up kills all around you without you actually pointing your noise to them (I'm not kidding)
The idea of upgrading your ships instead of buying new one is actually pretty good, but sometime it can be somewhat frustrating flying around just for the purpose of finding upgrading material (artifacts)
The game environment is really nothing to brag about. Although there are suppose to be 300 systems in the game, but they are all pretty much alike; with background color of: blue, red, purple, green added with features like asteroid, ice crystal. And there can be only so much combinations of them before you see it all.
Alas the story. I feel like DS1 tried to expend too much on their in game characters while at the same time attempting to write an explosive storyline. However it fall flat on the letter. The story felt flat, sometimes you really don't care what happens to the AI NPC and sometimes the storyline gets somewhat confusing (I think its due to the awkward translation from Germany to English). In the end when you finishes the last mission you don't really get excited and feels accomplishment the way you felt when you finished FL, it was just a mission, perhaps longer. And in the end you really don't cares what happens to the NPCs in DS1 as much as you could felt for FL NPCs. I really want an expansion for FL the movement the game ended, but as for DS1, I wouldn't wait to uninstall it from my hard drive to free up the 4.5GB of space.