The Last Starship

I played Prison Architect from the same studio before, so this game kept popping up in my notifications. Finally I bit the bullet and bought it. I must admit it was one of the best decisions I made.
Pros:
1- Very engaging gameplay
2- More than one way to play it; go wild and spend hours or days in creative mode to build the best ship ever, or just dive into the story. The choice is yours.
3- Regardless of which mode you play, you determine your play style. Either be a cargo boss and ship stuff all around, rescue people from dire situations, construct a factory of a ship, or jump onto the hostiles guns blazing. Alternatively, mix and match as you wish.
4- No two gameplays are alike. I restarted the game several times, and it evolved in a new direction based on my experience and knowledge each time.
5- You keep learning. There is always a better way to do something, so you need to keep planning for it, be it combat, manufacturing or shipment routes.
6- Industry tree is clear and satisfactory. You can figure out what you need for which material and where to find it in a few hours.
7- You can design your ships and publish them on Steam, or just subscribe to published ship designs to add variety to in-game ship types.
Cons:
1- Still in Alpha (Alpha 11 was recently release as of this writing), so lots of stuff is still incomplete, especially the stories.
2- Rotation mechanics of the equipment is primitive; I yearn for "flip" option in addition to "rotate" to align the outputs of my refineries and chem labs (pretty please?)
3- You can't go back to the previous sector, which is a big issue for me. Sometimes I jump to the next sector only to see that it contains little minerals and metreon, which was abundant in the previous system.
4- Contracts sometimes get assigned to systems that are not properly spawned. This seems to be somewhat fixed in Alpha 11 but the systems may still be off the sector map. However, this can be fixed by carefully editing the save file. Still a nuisance.
5- Habitation cannot be removed/reduced.
6- Editor needs a semi-transparency option so that I can see where I'm editing.
7- Science tree is underwhelming. In my opinion, there should be LOTS more to research and manufacture. Ability to discover/trade/steal industry recipes is a must.
8- My biggest pet peeve: you can't sell/fire crew! So if you hire a scientist and complete the rather short science tree, all he/she does is just hang around. Or if you decide to downsize and get rid of your guns, there's no simple way to fire your weapons officers. Same goes for crew if you decide to go for automation and suddenly have too much crew. This should be fixed.
9- Last but not least, a multiplayer mode can be very good. I'd be happy to exchange materials with a friend or fight the baddies as a team. Not sure how feasible this idea is, though.
All in all, a very original game that can keep you entertained if you like this type. Highly recommended, even though it's still in early access.
EDIT (after 630+ hours of total gameplay):
I'm impressed by the fact that the developer considers the feedback from the players!
As of Alpha 13, the game has been developed considerably so to be fair, I need to add the following:
1- Habitation can be edited to grow or shrink
2- Ship editor is much better now, so creating/editing your ship is much more enjoyable
3- Research tree has been improved and became a good investment to improve your ship. Capabilities include, but not limited to, faster smelters, faster drones, faster tracks, etc. See release notes for a full list.
4- Finally, crew can be "sold" (for 0 credits, so in effect you fire them, but good enough for me)
5- Storage crates (new item) is promising albeit a bit buggy (=crate contents cannot be used for contract/mission fulfillment but can be sold).
6- Deflectors is a very welcome addition to ship defenses and, if properly located, give you a real edge especially in close-quarters combat.
Other items in my Cons list still stand, but I believe that this list will shrink fast, given that the developers keep surprising us pleasantly. Kudos!

There is a lot to like about this game, but there is also a lot to not like. I like the ship building and missions, running passengers and cargo around the galaxy and what not even mining and smelting to make components. Then after I have spent hours upon hours on a save and I have a nice multi role battle ship i jump into a sector and the game comes to a halt and my crew goes into full blown slow motion, while the NPC ships have fired multiple shots at my ship(s) and my ships are struggling to get off a shot, my power grid will choose this moment to fail even though it has way more energy than it would ever need, and all of a sudden my ship(s) get destroyed and my only option is to start a new save even though i have 30 or 40 million credits sitting that i could easily buy a new ship with at a shipyard. Now before you say don't play on a potato I have a 12 core 4ghz processor with 64gb of RAM and a 12gb video card. I can run much bigger games on ultra setting with no stutter. This game isn't optimized, they force fighting on you, the battle part of this game is THE WORST PART of this game. I have played this game since day one. I was on it play minutes after it released, and I have watched the devs work with the community and make many changes and improvements. I have never liked the battles in this game. I have never thought it had good battle mechanics. The last update the DEVS in their infinite quest to mess up the game thought it would be a good idea to make battling pirates a requirement to advance through jump gates to the next sector. I you like doing the same thing over and over again and putting 50+ hours into a save to have faulty game mechanics force you to loose all that effort then this is your game. Some people like getting kicked in the nuts repeatedly, and they will enjoy this struggle. I don't! I play games to relax after work, I don't want a game that's a second F'ing job. I CAN NOT recommend this game. If I could refund with 354 hours of game play I would, but all I can do is uninstall it and let it hold a spot in my library till the devs one day have their heads removed from their asses, and they FIX this game.

The game in it's current state reminds me of playing some of the alpha versions of rimworld. It's already fun, engrossing and a little bit addictive and you can see loads of directions for it to be fleshed out with more content. If you're wondering if it's for you. apparently they just remade the demo, so probably try that first.

I got the game day 1 because i loved their previous games, but although I could see there was stuff in here I would enjoy, I kept bouncing off the game after 10mins of playing. When alpha 11 launched a few months ago, which remade the intro sequence, I came back and was immediately hooked. If you're like me and tried it before then I recommend giving it another go, it has much better pacing of small objectives that ease you into what the game CAN BE, rather than the old tutorial which showed you how to do some unhelpful end-game content and then threw you off into space.

There are lots of individual parts of the game I enjoy, but a lot of the satisfaction is that they're all running simultaneously. I remember the early versions of their previous game prison architect struggling when it got to 30 prisoners, but in this game you can have multiple ships, each that you've fully designed from scratch, flying around doing different tasks in different places, each with crew walking about inside and some with production lines going on, and I haven't had any performance problems. I like the feeling of it all running at the same time, that as I'm in the middle of a space battle, using a ship that I designed to be small and fast, I'm dodging in all directions, while getting my huge ship to carefully angle it's gun battery at the targets, at the same time as my space station is refining a bunch of materials I just harvested and my mining ship is catching up with an asteroid to break it apart for water ice.

The game is good now, I imagine it might be great in the future if they're able to keep expanding on this foundation. There's 40-50 hours worth of stuff to enjoy already, not including if you just want to get creative and keep designing bigger and better ships after the main story missions. I haven't even tried the survival mode yet, although I don't think it's been the developers focus. If you only play early access games when they're basically finished but just need a bit of polish then this won't be for you, but otherwise give the new demo a go and see if you like it.

Early Access but there's a lot of fun to be had already.
Exactly what I want from a space sandbox, I love designing and re-designing my ship/fleet, solving missions and winning battles before they begin with intense planning. The iterative factor is what's great, how it's a lot easier to retrofit what you have than try to start over, but also less optimal.
The updates I've played have been very good. I'm looking forward to where this goes but I feel like I got my money's worth already.

Its an unfinished game, so the main story stops 2/3 of the way thru... its fun for what it is. Hopefully the Dev's finish the game and fix a few of the bugs. Like in free roam you cant seperate your fleet without rewriting some code.

In its current unfinished state, it is already a lot of fun. I would suggest wishlisting it until release, because there is high risk of PA-burnout: Putting so much time in an Alpha, you're done with it by the time there is a full release (this happened to me with prison architect).

Great fun - no wonder Scotty always had a way to increase efficiency on the Enterprise