I hate this question, never understood why people ask it, your always going to get conflicting answers, and you probably wont believe its good if everyone says so, the only way to find out is to do research or play a demo, unfortunately their is no demo for this game but you get my point.
I shall then answer your question with several questions of my own.
1) Do you have a surplus of currency equal to or greater than USD $8.99? (Only until the 9/21 then will be $10)
2) Do you enjoy the idea of managing the crew and weaponry of a fictional spacecraft?
3) Do you enjoy turn-based/pause-based games like Fallout 1 and 2, or dungeon crawler games like Legend of Grimrock and the older games it was based off of?
4) Did you ever enjoy text based games, where the graphics were nothing more than a static picture? If yes, this game actually has moving characters and sounds, welcome to the future.
Now that that’s done, I shall give you my opinion of this game in Pro/Con format as requested.
Pros:
*Challenging game-play, Normal is more like Hard in other games and the different ship types you can unlock can make it much more difficult or easier depending on the ship. For example: I have done at least 10 playthroughs with the Rock Cruiser and haven’t got past sector 4, while I can almost guarantee ill get to sector 7 or 8 with the Engi ship every time, this could be purely my fault and based on play style.
*Infinite replay value, everything after character creation, or ship creation, is completely random, sometimes this can cause a more difficult playthrough, but I like that aspect of the game, you never know what you are going to get.
*Short but sweet games, if you rocket through it it might take you about 8 hours to finish, but its still satisfying when you beat it and see your high score in that ship. I personally like to read everything even if iv seen it before because every once in a while the outcome will be different.
*Loot based game-play, everyone likes loot, well everyone that plays loot based games, its always nice to see that awesome Biobeam weapon pop up on your screen when you come out of FTL at another beacon.
Cons:
*It will suck away your weekend before you even knew time had passed, you will look at the clock one moment and the next time you look 4-5 hours have passed.
*The Fleet advancement mechanic is annoying, but its there for balance, the game would be a lot less entertaining without it IMO, if it weren’t there you could explore the entire sector before moving on and you’d have more weapons and money by the end sector than you could spend and your ship would be maxed out on everything, making the end a cakewalk.
*Can be very frustrating at times when the game seems to be completely against you winning. For example, never looting a weapon the whole way through or none of the stores that you could find carry weapons, or having to spend all your money on missiles just to keep playing because of this issue, I'm looking at you Rock Cruiser.
In summary this game is well worth the money I paid for it, I would have paid $30 for it had that been the asking price.
Picard Simulator!! you are awesome in a box sir. Have a cookie.