So, the graphics in space look great. Cool, active stations buzzing with ships and visibly producing cool things. Huge capital ships with turrets that deploy and engines and jump drives and shield generators that you can target and destroy. If you could look around your cockpit (which you can't...no HOTAS joystick support for you!) it would look pretty neat. Cool stuff all around.
As of release, the game is so buggy that I haven't been able to play more than an hour without a crash to desktop. A number of quests are bugged to the point where you have to restart a new game. I expect that from Egosoft, they always release buggy games and then spend a year fixing them (at which point they are usually pretty good games).
The real problems are in the gameplay mechanics. The game, supposedly an immerssive PC space sim, includes a number of completely asinine mini-games (speech, hacking, highway travel). Half of the point of walking around on stations is to loot containers and lockers that are just lying around. What?! The other half is talking to inexplicably ugly and poorly animated and voiced NPCs. They are all seriously 100 year old grandmas with big chests and the voice of a 20-year old who sounds like she just wants to read her lines and go to the bar. When they turn their heads, their glasses/visors/etc don't move with them right away. I'm not kidding. The out-of-ship gameplay is just stupifyingly terrible. I can't stress that enough.
So let's do some trading, how does that work? Well. You have to continuously fly around the various stations, finding "offers" hidden on random points on the station. You can't see them until you're a few km out, and you can't save them until your ship is pretty much nosing into them. These offers expire after about half an hour, at which point you'll have to find more. Think about this near end-game: you have 100 trading ships (common with previous X games), how the HELL are you going to keep them busy unless all you do is scan these stupid stations night and day to keep your trade list active? Don't they have radios, or bulletin boards, or trading exchanges in the future?!?! It's a horrible game design decision.
There are many other problems that I won't go into here. The consensus seems to be that Egosoft tried to make Rebirth into a console game for the Xbox 360, failed at that, and then crammed it onto the PC just so it wasn't a total writeoff.
Personally, I feel ripped off for having paid full price to pre-order this almost unplayable heap. I may go back to it in 6 months or so after some patches are released and the modding community fixes some of the more egregious gameplay problems. I will never pre-order another Egosoft game. Ever.