I'll drop the rambling narrative. Imagine many of you reading have eyes starting to glaze over already.
1. Game income seems geared towards mining, but this doesn't fit well with the main character's story (not to mention if mining is the main grind, why was the 'tutorial' about a different way to make money?).
2. Scanner lists percentages for discovering things of value at a location. The percent does not change based on the player's location, although the results certainly do (a metal infused mining planet is much more likely to yield mineable ore than a heavily populated planet where every square inch is owned by someone, not to mention likelihood of finding a workable mine at a space station). The percentages should change to give a true representation of what the player might find.
3. Crash sites and floating debris seem to be more expensive to investigate, while they should be cheaper. (Digging and excavation is an added cost to mining which isn't needed for salvage. Entering and exiting the planet's gravity well is the biggest fuel requirement, and not needed for space debris. Truthfully I wouldn't care much which cost more or less, so long as the rewards were reasonably commensurate. See #4)
4. Not only are non-mining sites more expensive in the game, but their returns are also smaller than mining. They aren't worth the effort. (Not to mention a bit silly. Really, I searched a crashed spaceship and the only salvage I found worth keeping was 2 dildos? Seriously? The scrap-metal heap is certainly worth more than that just as raw metal, not to mention possible fuel siphon, navigation core, ship drive, etc. I realize it's a wreck. Much is damaged or old and outdated. Still seems we should be able to walk away with something at least equal to the fuel it took us to investigate it if we're at the point of grabbing 2 cans of corn.)
5. We're trying to flee the Swarm, yet the entire game plays out with us bouncing back and forth between exactly 2 locations. The initial tale is that we need a full fuel tank before we depart, yet we fill up our tank time and time again and continue to not flee.
6. The farmer claims the crash site to investigate is on Merc Red, yet he and it are actually on Solitude.
7. The first and second ship upgrades are Red Dwarf and Teal Thunder. No where is there any sort of explanation that these are mining droids. I bought the upgrades regardless, because that's what one does with upgrades, but it took a long time to come to any conclusion about what they were or how they helped. I still have no idea what the +50 and +80 crystals mean. If I found 10-30 crystals without an upgrade, the first upgrade certainly does not yield 60-80 (Maybe it's a percent increase. Although initially our ship starts with +30, so percent doesn't make sense either. Regardless, it's ambiguous at best. Also, the initial droids and the first upgrade are both titled Red Dwarf.)
8. Combat, we start with a damage rating of 0. I'm not sure how we ever hurt anyone doing exactly no damage. Obviously there is some hidden base damage, but I don't understand why it is hidden.
9. Not user-friendly at all to make us equip personal items. If I'm in a shop, buy a new gun, and run into an attacker on my way back to the ship, I expect to be shooting with my new gun. I don't expect to need to return to my ship, go to my cabin, go to my computer, inspect my file, find my new gun, and then say... Hey, use this. At a bare minimum we should be able to swap our personal equipment from inside the shop as well.
10. Most of the game was simply money gathering. There was no plot; no threat; no strategy. (Travel to mining planet, scan, mine, return to shop, sell, add fuel, repeat.) It quickly became tedious. Also, prices (for upgrades) went up faster than mining growth. So as the game went on, it just took more and more repeats to buy an upgrade (fine if there is other interesting things going on maybe, but really boring when this is all there is).
11. For some reason it cost a ton of fuel to idly drift over a planet and scan it repeatedly, but cost no fuel at all to travel from planet to planet, or even solar system to solar system (At least that means we didn't need to deal with arbitrarily finding ourselves adrift in space while out of fuel. We could always still travel anywhere we wanted. Not exactly realistic though).
(As the game plays, I feel like we should have been declared as a miner in the backstory. Income growth could have been accomplished by giving the ship upgrades for the cargo hold size. We could have burnt fuel to travel through space. Scanning and mining could have been free, but possibly with a "threat" cost. Maybe a specific found mine has 200 crystals in it and the player mines in 20 crystal increments [so I click the mine button 4 times to fill my hold]. With each click there is a chance of a pirate attack. Each scan 'click' also takes time and has a chance of attack. Maybe the longer we stay at one location the odds of being attacked keep increasing. Better droids mean each mining click grabs more crystals. As the ship is upgraded it looks like a richer target and increases likelihood of pirate attack or increases power of attacking pirates.) Note, this is as the game plays already, not as the plot goes.
Moving on from the plot resource gathering side of things, this is after all expected to be a "sexy" game.
12. The women were pretty much completely uninvolved in the gameplay. Some were kind of used to spawn a quest or as support during a fight, but for the most part they were meaningless bystanders.
13. When we did go out of our way to click on a girl, the only real interaction was a 'talk to' button. Clicking the button resulted in some chatter of no importance. If we eventually clicked that button enough times during the game, we eventually got one and only one chance to actually do something with them.
14. The sex scenes lacked any choice or control (with the girl that gave us the tutorial quest, she did have sex with us prior to being able to do the repeated 'talk to' actions. From what I recall though, we didn't even get to choose whether or not to have sex with her. If we wanted to claim faithfulness to our pilot, playing hard to get, or just not interested in her... too bad. First time I can think of being forced into sex with someone other than the main love interest in any game.). Once or twice we did get to choose what was said at some random point in the middle of a sex scene, but for the most part it felt linear and forced.
15. Gameplay gave the appearance of trying to build strong relationships with the girls and building their trust (even if accomplished in a very, very minimalist way). However, the relationships played out more as a love them and leave them, one night stand, variety.