So, spent a couple hours on it over a few days. It's pretty fun and makes for a nice distraction. It's one of those games with "meta-progression" where you unlock more and more stuff from the progress you made in a playthrough. Some stuff you find directly: ship module blueprints, ship paint colours (!), alternative starting loadouts, most stuff you unlock on the Perks screen after dying, spending all all the cash you earned in that run. That includes two other ships (three if you have the expansion).
The game consists in advancing through a number sectors, one jump at a time (bit FTL-style in terms of map/sector). Each jump takes you to a single zone, comparable to a CQC instance in ED. Each zone comes with its own stuff to find: resources to mine, floating wrecks to explore, loot to collect, roaming enemy ships, enemy bases, neutral ships, traders, capital ships, jump interdictors you need to take down, drone carrier ships... There's a decent variety. When you feel like it, you're free to jump to the next zone or next sector if you were in the final zone of the current sector. Rinse and repeat, with storyline events mixed up in there at times, and an AI commenting on anything you encounter for the first time before a data entry is added to your log.
Movement/Combat is 6DoF, with binary thrusters (on/off), an extra "forward" boost, and traditional space tar (max speed and ship slowing down in vacuum) for your typical space dogfight. Binary thrusters mean that a throttle is more of a hindrance than anything, and the game is ideally controlled with mouse and keyboard. Weapons include lasers (pulse, beams), ballistic projectiles, various types of missiles, and there are toys such as weapon/shield boosters, missile scramblers, drones, drone scramblers, etc.
The result is a fast-ish paced game that gets you straight into the action, jump after jump, always sets you in a new visually gorgeous environment with *something* to investigate, and has you compete with yourself by going further/doing better than the previous time. Right now a run takes me 30minutes to an hour which is a sweet spot for some of my gaming time windows.
Not sure I'd recommend it at full price, but for a tenner, I'm pretty happy with it. Might pick up the expansion if it keeps entertaining me as it just adds more stuff to increase variation from run to run (weapons, modules, a ship, enemies, resources, locations...).
On a side note, it really feels like it could (should?) have been a part of ED as an alternative score attack game mode (say, in place of CQC...). All the assets required are there in ED already: flight/combat, ships, locations, upgrade system, resource gathering, comms... It's the kind of stuff I'd have expected to see had a mod scene been a thing, but ah.