This one definitely feels like just another FTL copy just by looking at it, but it's certainly something else.
They tried to give the player more control over how they build the spaceship. (in FTL, rng is a big part of the game)
I think it was a great idea, as this way, you cannot blame the game for being bad, most of the mistakes are on your part.
They have a unique feature over FTL too, and that is, combat inside the spaceship. Enemies will usually try to board your ship and kill you that way.
Because of this, crew management needs a lot of action, and it doesn't help that you can have a lot of crew, and some ships can be hard to navigate around.
The space exploration part is not the best part of the game, but quite okay nonetheless.
Ship to ship combat has some nice twist to it, as you can fully customize your weaponry, thus you can approach the fights in your own way.
However, the ability to freely build your ship's weaponry is the biggest downfall of the game too.
Once you figure out a working strategy, every run becomes the same.
For me, once I realized that while energy weapons have lower dmg compared to other types, them not using ammunition (which is a resource you'd constantly buy on space stations otherwise) is so much more cost efficient, I just started deconstructing every turret, and rebuilding them as energy weapons.
Now, yes, there are different ship types with differing amount of weapon slots, rocket tubes and other building spots.
And the aforementioned energy weapon build might not work on smaller ships since the space limitations.
But the problem is, almost every new ship you unlock, is larger than the previous, so I started forgetting about space management, and went to cost efficiency quite quickly.
General encounters are, well,, quite general, you get a few choices, if you pick the right one, you get loot, maybe rng is involved a bit.
The last thing this game has is metaprogression. You can unlock starting buffs, that you can spend points on for every run. (I forgot how those points work, but you get them for achievements, or something like that)
These buffs can be something so simple as just a few resources or a new crew member, but there are some that take away stuff from you, in exchange for something big.
All in all, I think it's a great game for the 30 hours or so, but after you have unlocked enough ships and buffs, the game just becomes boring. Unless of course, you start hunting for achievements, as there are quite a lot of them on steam.
(This review does not contain information about the DLC, and it might be a bit out of date, since I played the game mostly after launch, and haven't touched it since, but a quick look at the update notes don't suggest any drastic changes.)