Take off your rose-tinted glasses, this space sim isn't as great as they make it out to be.
Flying: too arcadish. Things are out there somewhere, or in your face or screaming past you at high speed. Possibly better later on, after all in the first few missions the enemies were pretty small light and fast craft. Still, the feel and handling is too fast paced overall. Once you master sliding (a matter of minutes' practice), you shouldn't have trouble tracking most anything, and I imagine this will be a huge leg up over the AI.
Presentation: seems decent, and the protagonist is a likeable kind of chap. Still, I would really have loved subtitles. Graphics are okay, but somehow feel sparse despite the abundance of colour. Sound effects seem below par though, the laser effects were quite typical short-high pitched effects you'd expect from a budget game, not meaty enough.
Gameplay: no saving? Automated? Which means you can't undo previous decisions once you've flown new missions. Meh. Also, you CAN'T take off unless you've picked a mission, and you CAN'T land anywhere else if it isn't your objective. So there aren't really any decisions to undo, because there aren't any to be made (aside from the story branching thing). Speaking of which, I can't believe a mere 2-story arc was enough to overlook the total linearity of everything else. Aside from the missions, there's nothing else to do, or can do... which makes Tachyon, basically, an adventure where you merely need to survive the fights in between cutscenes to get to the end. Sorry, not my cup of tea.
The story gives a good impression despite the wobbly start (you're dumped in a station with no clue how to proceed, until you pick a mission and then discover the dialogue continue as you take off). I was sufficiently interested by the main character to see where the story was headed, but not in the gameplay itself unfortunately.