Incredibly immersive and detailed but you lose far too much if you die.
For the noob it's pretty good fun, highly addictive and has a shelf life of about 6 months before you start to find the missions, mining and trade tiresome and repetitive. The combat is really dull.. simply target the ship and click fire.Your lasers/guns continuously fire until the target is destroyed. You don't even fly your ship, you click where you want to go and hit full speed. There is some tactics invloved when it comes to what laser to use, armour or equipment to doesn't require any proper skillful combat or flying. This is certainly one of the main criticisms of the game.
The main reason I left this game though was because of the amount you set to lose if you die. If you lose a battleship which is easly done on the harder missions or when flying in low security space, you can lose millions of isk (money) in assets. Not to mention the rare items you would have lost that you had equipped which sometimes are almost as valuable as the ship itself.
This can take months of mindless mining and repetitive missions to recooperate the loses even when you take out insurance on the ship. The fact you lose your ship means sometimes you dont have another large ship to recoop the loses quickly so you end up back to square one, with a poor ship and no money.
Imagine playing WOW and everytime you die you drop half your levels and had to repeat all the same missions to gain XP and also buy new equipment! Some people actually say this is good for the game and that having so much on the line is a buzz.. but theyre probably the ones with endless wealth already who care little if they lose a BS. It makes people too afraid to explore and actually do battle in my opinion.
The trade system is a little narfed in the fact that people sell their goods at ridiculously low prices almost non-profit prices making manufacture of goods a waste of time nearly. Take this example: Someone makes drones for say 30k and sells for 40k and everyone was happy and everyone was buying them. Lets say the time took to manufacutre this was 1 hour meaning I make 10k per hour. If I was mining or doing missions I would probably make the same amount per hour or at least should.
Then along comes some fool who decides to get one over and sell at 35k. Now this guy doesnt care that he is making 5k an hour because at the end of the day its not a real game... you dont have to feed yourself or clothe your family and he wont go bankrupt so he doesnt care if he's making half the profit per hour than the mining or missions. It's like spending a whole day making something and charging $10 for it..it just doesn't happen in the real world.
But then the next fool who comes along thinks ah I'll get one over and charge 33k for the drone and so it spirals down to virtually no profit. This may seem irrelevant with just one example but remember there are hundreds of thousands playing this game and there are thousands of people making. So manufacture is almost a waste of time.
Anyway, after losing a few battleships in a few months I became so annoyed with the game I 'passed' my account on to someone who gave me as much for the account as I'd spent in monthly fees....which was nice :)