Lots to do in this galaxy.
It’s frustrating that you don’t have a chance against the Klissans until you’ve upgraded your ship. You can usually avoid the Klissans, but it doesn’t always work. The Klissans are constantly trying to take over star systems, and you can get into a situation where your only path to a goal takes you to a system where the Klissans are fighting. Eventually, you’ll be tough enough to follow other NPC Space Rangers around and take on the Klissans with their help. You’ll even get tough enough to clean the Klissans out of a system by yourself, that’s pretty fun, until you land and it costs $10,000 to repair all your equipment.
You get offered a lot of different jobs in this game. Sometimes you’re a courier, you get paid money to take a cargo from one planet to another. Sometimes you’re a bounty hunter, you get paid to destroy a certain ship. This can be harder than it sounds. Enemy ships are often faster than you. Also, if an enemy can reach a planet before you destroy them they can repair their ship, and you have to start over in wearing down their armor. The text-based missions are my favorite. It’s like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books I read when I was a kid. Some of them I beat in one try, but most of them took a few tries, and thankfully there’s no penalty for starting over.
There's also what's called Arcade Mode, when your ship is in hyperspace. You enter hyperspace "clots" that look a lot like being inside a pinball machine. There's powerups, and pirates, and you steer your ship manually with the keyboard, instead of using the mouse the way you do in "normal" space. You can avoid these if you want. I didn't find them worth the effort.
I’ve beat this game once, but there appears to be multiple possible endings to the game, and I don’t think I advanced far enough in rank to get all the best equipment, so I’m going to try again.