Interstellar Rift

First off to note: This game is pretty much "Complete" as far as the devs are concerned. There have been no updates in almost 2 years as of this writing. That being said there are SOME bugs i've found, but nothing game breaking. Few inventory issues. I'm only 30 hours into the game so far so take that with a grain of salt.
As far as the game itself, it plays fairly easily however it should be noted this game DOES NOT HOLD YOUR HAND. This is a SANDBOX game. You have missions, you can build pre-built stations (for everyone to use), you can highly customize your ship, you can trade, mine and you can explore the galaxy. The only thing at this point I know to do is achievement chase and try to do all the achievements.
Mining is key and very simple. Fly near an asteroid, select it from the extractor and click mine. Grab the crates and process the material in the various machines. What each material is used in appears in game and you can trace the build chain down the in game encyclopedia. There's a lot of things to build.
Cons:
In-game encyclopedia is all you have. There's basically no documentation that I've seen. The wiki is on a website full of ads and its very incomplete. Basics are there, but you can already learn that pretty easily by the tutorials and muddling through. I watched some older videos from 2019 and 2020 on youtube to get some expanded help on intermediate topics, but unless you've played some time in the game, they're all very hard to follow. My biggest gripe is if this is considered a "complete" game, documentation would have been included and better tutorials on more advanced topics.
Second con is the combat is really clunky. Its pew pew and watch health bars drop and dont die. When your ship starts to catch fire, its chaos especially if you're all alone.
Third con is related to that, being alone sucks. There's not many people who still play the game, so hopefully you have some friends who want to get the game. Having friends would probably make this game a lot more enjoyable for me. There is automation to help you run the ship on your own but you have to have the more advanced ships to get those features, and it is hard to do so solo. I was able to get my rep up to level 1 to be able to buy the second level ship fairly easily by building the various space stations in the starter system, but a public server would already have those built which will make it more challenging. There's a lot of grind in this game and having someone help you with it, would probably make it easier for a new player. If both are new or one has a little bit of concept of how the game works, a duo would have a lot more enjoyment from the game. I've never played it with anyone so I don't know how well it works, but from the videos i've seen it has some pulsar lost colony vibes with space engineers building thrown in.
Last con is it feels like there's no content, but its not REALLY that empty. You just have to gain skill and rep to unlock more things to do. If you go and play the game as each of the various factions, they all have their own spin on the game and how to play it. One is combat oriented, one is trade oriented, one is a scavenger, and the last one is mining oriented. It seems most people play as the mining one since its the easiest to do. To have a better challenge play one or all of the other factions and get their rep to max. Landing on planets or having some kind of planetary interaction I feel was a missed opportunity but its not really required the way the game is setup. This is about space and not planets. That being said I would have liked to have seen some ground colonies to land at and interact with and it wouldn't have been too hard to make them "space stations" on the ground. You could have teleported to the surface with a long range teleporter or something.
Pros: It is a fun challenge to learn the various aspects of the game. I've tried to figure stuff out on my own and it makes the game fairly interesting. There's a lot of depth to the game mechanics. The ship building is fairly easy to use interface with a lot of technical underlying components to customize your ship and how well it will perform. I have yet to build a ship, but i've dabbled in the interface some and realized its a bit over my head for what I know at this point of the game. I need to understand more of how the ships work before going into building my own, and I don't want to steal any off the workshop because I won't know how they work.
Overall opinion:
The game is challenging, it doesn't hold your hand which I personally like that. It provides a challenge. Those that want a guided mission, story line, and tutorial won't like this game. There is a tutorial for it, but it only scratches the surface and was very easy to complete. Almost to the point of I didn't even understand what I was doing when I played them the first time through. In the end I'd recommend buying the game on sale since the devs are done with the game clearly. I don't think $20 is a good price for this game since there's a lot of things it could have had that it doesn't have. The "polished" and "finished" feel of the game to me at this point isn't there. Things like only hearing "one foot step" when walking around is quite annoying and in a finished game I'd expect those kinds of things to be non-existent. The combat and flight mechanics could be better, and the drones running into stations while you're on them are very disorienting when the whole station starts to spin. None of that should happen in a "finished game" imo. I got it on sale for $6 which I feel was reasonable for what you get. I'd have paid $10 for it, but not much over that.
TL;DR -
I do recommend the game if you're into space games and enjoy a challenge when the game is at a sale price.

Can someone pick this game back up and continue development? There is so much potential for this game. I like the idea for a more Co-op/ PvE type of play. Hirable Ai to do specific duties and have them susceptible to damage that will need both food and medical when needed. Oh the joy it would be.

Best ship editor I've ever had the pleasure to use. I'm not going to claim this beats some other games... you aren't gonna be walking around planets or anything outside your ship or a station here, but designing the ship is just amazing in this game.

It lets you do things like clip light fixtures into some of the equipment, so for example you can end up making a lamp on the side of something with what is normally a standing light fixture, something I could never do in certain other grid based games like Space Engineers. You can easily scale rooms up in size if you want, instead of building walls block by block you set rooms by their size and connect them with doors... this makes it fast and easy to fix if you realize a room was bigger or smaller than needed.

It isn't quite as good at some other aspects, but the space combat and mining and trading are in fact all there and quite functional, if a little mediocre when it comes to combat and mining. But 11/10 on the way they handled designing your ship.

This is pretty much the definition of "we have Elite: Dangerous at home."

Yet if it's an Elite: Dangerous knock-off, why does it have such a great, full-feature interior ship-building and design system that allows for individual module placement?

To be honest, it may be worth a purchase just to play around with that. You can design the ship of your dreams...then fly it around in a lifeless galaxy.

It's alright. Fun game to play COOP with a few friends. Some good ship building and progression. Last update was 2 years ago so be aware of no new content.

Great game. built on an engine one gen before it shouldve been. Its a fun game but gets bogged down when you get enough stuff going on.
ship building is great. not as complicated as some games. mining left something to be desired sometimes but they had a well rounded mechanic to it all. I would love if they put some love into the game. unsure on server status now tho. when ive played this it was with friends.

It has potential for sure. If the devs add more parts for builders like more weaps (very limited) and made ore scanning and mining easier then it is now (chasing a roaming rock...come on now.)
Its very big very open so NEEDS CONTENT!!!!! a more robust local area traffic presence or something more them mechanized space worms??? (skrill)
The build mechanic is good, Took some getting used to but once you get it not bad.
but desperately needs context on ALL levels,
All in all it has the basis and potential but start competing with empyrion galactic survival. but it HAS to be tended to in order to do so.
More contents, more QOLs more everything, ATM its a shell of what it could be.