Great idea, Poorly Executed
It all comes down to the the combat system: It's indecipherable. After 15+ hours of game play all I can really tell you is sometimes you kick ass – and sometimes your ass gets kicked. The difference seems completely arbitrary.
WInning is a matter of how often your fleet's batteries score a hit on an enemy ship. There are enemies you hit 90% of the time, and enemies you hit less than 5% of the time. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground. More frustrating, you can come up against exactly the same class of ship being piloted by the same enemy and get one result one time (90% hit rate) and another the next (10% hit rate). No matter how you configure your ship or who you put in what role, the outcome of battles still seems arbitrary. About the only good thing is after the first volley, you'll know whether it's going to be an easy win our of you're going to get slaughtered because, as I said above, there is no in-between.
Perhaps if the combat user interface did a better job communicating what was happening, it might seem less arbitrary and you might actually have a chance to change something and improve your performance. But the UI is as wooden as it is confusing and tells you little more than you win or you lose, and shows you crappy, pixelated images of the ships you're battling.
Beyond the horrific battle mechanics, the RPG part of the game seems like it could be interesting. There might actually be a good story buried in here, if you can get past the senseless battles to experience it.
This game is my most disappointing of 2010 so far. Because I love space sims and RPGs and any game that brought both together even reasonably well would have become my next DS addiction.
Guess there's nothing for it but to wait for my copy of SMT: Strange Journey to arrive.