An absolutely brilliant mining sim. Slightly impenetrable, but a true gem if you like this niche.

Pros:
- This is hard science and everything is simulated with physics, from thrust vectoring to the movement of cargo in your bay. There is powerful autopilot, which allows you to establish speed and direction relative to the background or any object, but it is entirely possible to fly completely manually.
- Lots of varieties of ships which play completely differently, from the basic workhorse, to huge titans that weigh north of 500 tons, to graceful (and very expensive) luxury craft.
- Lots of ways to make money: the obvious mining, trading, bounty hunting, collecting anomalies, etc.
- You can tune lots of parameters of your ship exactly the way you want it, from the power and frequency of your weapons, to the thrust of your engine and thrusters, to the precise parameters of your autopilot behaviours.
- Full refund on undamaged equipment means it's easy to experiment with different loadouts.
- A few questlines for you to uncover and follow.
- Great soundtrack.
- Low price!

♥♥♥♥:
- It's a daunting start. Almost the entire inventory of equipment and ships is available to you right from the start with the only limitation being money, and the tuning menu adds an additional layer of complexity. Once you get some experience, you'll know what to use and which parameters to adjust, but for a newbie it's info overload. Though, if you are the experimenting type, this may instead be a plus for you.
- Most of the time, it's a very slow game. Very slow. I recommend a speedhack so you can play at a reasonable speed while not actually taking forever to get anywhere.
- The slowness applies not just to the moment-to-moment gameplay, but to the larger progress of the game as well. Random events trigger on a time-based schedule, leading to long stretches with nothing happening, made even worse if you are looking for a particular place or event. Worst of all, the nature of these random events means there is a lot of repetition. Most of the time, a new point of interest will turn out to a moonlet of no particular note instead of a space station or something interesting. It gets especially frustrating when you realise at a meta level that your crew consume these random events as well, so once you complete their questlines it becomes advantageous to get rid of them to get more of the events that you want instead of having your pilot comment about rodents in the engine room for the 10th time. Of course there is always something to do, but the wait can be boring nevertheless.
- This over-reliance on random events is possibly the only actual negative I have with the game. Maybe this could be improved with a faster cadence? Or a less random distribution of events (say, if you find a moonlet, you have lower chances to find another one the next time a POI comes up)?
- There is zero handholding. None. For example, your crew can be one of several archetypes, some of which have associated questlines. There is nothing to tell you which crew has which type (even once discovered), nor the current or next steps to any of their questlines. It's left for you to organically discover over the course of many (many) dives into the rings, because progress on each of these quests is tied in large part to random events. Again, this can be a positive for some, but a little UI help would be great.
- Related to the above: the wiki is rather barebones. The Discord server is quite active and helpful though, so if you want any information you'll likely have to go there.
- Some of the achievements border on the unobtainable: there is one which requires you to play with 303 concurrent players, which has only happened in 4 months of the game's entire history on Steam. There is also series of achievements which requires you to spend 10 hours with each ship type - fair enough for the mining ships, but bordering on sadistic for the tiny Kitsune shuttle. I sat docked in the bar with a 10x speedhack and the game in the background for this one.

These negatives notwithstanding: if you are ok with the lack of handholding and somewhat slow pace, this is a truly brilliant game that will keep you entertained for dozens of hours.

Delta V honestly does so much right and is just such a wonderful hidden gem of a space sim. The fact each ship feels like essentially a side grade means you get to pick your path and how you explore at your own pace. Maybe you’ll end up like me and just sticking in a Kestrel forever.

Game’s well worth the price and well worth the time to play.

Very nice space mining game!

I've played for 52 hours? wtf how? it didn't feel that long?!

This is a totally chill space game. Not much to do, except mine rocks, avoid pirates and pimp your ride. There are a few mild plot point, but overall the game is beautiful and full of atmosphere with just enough hard sci-fi for the space sim fan in all of us.

Amazing enviroment and world design. The game play is a blast. Plug in some headphones while you play for the best experience.

A great game. If you invest some time into it and get to really learn the controls and how the sim works, you will not be disappointed.

I went in expecting a mechanically competent asteroid mining game, which would already be worth what I paid. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of charm and polish present in these systems, like intricate damage effects. The game's world can easily be inferred from ship designs and descriptions as well as some odd events out in the rings. Each weapon and ship (though sometimes just simple variants) offer their own niches and are mechanically diverse, rather than offering a clear progression. I have only encountered a single, unintrusive bug. Absolutely recommended if you enjoy newtonian-style space mining in any form.