It's Skyrim, but instead of overworld exploration and emergent encountersa, it's fast travel from mission to mission. As someone who put 350 hours into Skyrim, it really hit me that half of the fun to be had in Skyrim was the overworld exploration and emergent encounters.

The universe feels very small when you complete a mission, open up your mission list, and after a brief loading screen are standing in another city on another planet with a new set of tasks.

That's why I said in my comment below that I just want to fly my damn ship into outer space. The system would have felt so much more satisfying if you could select a mission and then that star is highlighted from your in-ship augmented display, and you press the buttons to warp there, and then you're at the edge of that solar system and can navigate to the specific planet in real time. During that time, you might encounter pirates, or find an asteroid mining installation, or hear a distress call, or detect a fleet of ships near a moon planning an attack.

And that's another thing: the backstory for this game is all about the Colony War, a conflict between three sides that involved mechs and xenowarfare (using alien creatures to attack settlements). That sounds amazing: why didn't we play in that time frame? By the time we've joined the universe, everything's resolved and relatively peaceful, except for random psychopaths. I guess Bethesda didn't want to invite ethical questions about killing people who were fighting for a good cause on each side, but, like... why not?