For me it's doubly good, as I never played past the first mission or two when I first bought it. This isn't me replaying an old game, this is me experiencing it new, for the first time. It's just wonderful, now that I've got back into the mindset.
Just last night I took our a cruiser that was intending to destroy the core reactor of an asteroid habitat (they'd ECMed the old gunstar platfoms I'd put into place and activated). I then tried to mop up the remaining baddies, only to find no main engine - wtf! There's a little flashing message "60 percent damage to main ring collider". I had to make do with thrusters until the auto-repair systems got the main power back on line, while my wingmen protected me.
That "whoompf" sound you get when a particle beam cannon hits your shields, and the purple wash of energy you get as it gets deflected. That whine as your LDS drive kicks in, or the "missile launch" warning and increased beeping as a missile closes in on you while you desperately shift your vector hard over so the missile overshoots or follows your decoys.
Sitting at jump points waiting for easy meat to come through. Going for a big transport, only to find five seconds later its three escorts jump in. Following a ship into space, using a drive inhibitor missile to force it to drop out of it's LDS drive, and then shooting it up to make it drop it's cargo - which you then call in your freighter pilot to pick up for you.
Disabling a ship at the inbound jump point and spreading it's cargo all over the point - into which all the incoming ships crash into as they jump in. Sitting around a pirate station looking for easy prey, only to get caught up in a naval sweep of the area and having to run away like a little girl from six corvettes.
A game that models heat and energy output - too much hardware and you get brownouts on your equipment. Too much heatsink damage and your weapons overheat. Deciding whether you should take the assault, stealth, standard or ECM loadouts on a mission, or make your own custom loadouts. Do you want firepower, or to minimise your emissions signature? Switching your fire from PCB, to rapid PBC, to quad light PBC because you overheat each one, and because you read in the manual that the damage from each one increases as your target gets closer.
Switching off the flight assist and going completely newtonian so that you can burst-fire your engines and then, power down your engine system and drift in without any give-away emissions.
You can even recycle your pirated goods and use the nano-factory in your base to make anything you have the blueprints for. Lose a turret fighter? No problem, as you snuck into a pirate base, hid out in the junkyard and took over a maintenance drone to steal a cargo load of them and their blueprints. As long as you have the raw materials to recycle, you can make another one.
Me, I'm greedily shopping for new weapons systems and wondering when I get a chance to get a bigger ship. I fancy a cruiser, but they handle like pigs, so a corvette will better suit a space-pirate operation I think...
