DarkStar One... isn't a good game, let's be honest. It took me 18 hours to beat on normal difficulty (finishing the plot + all side missions + all artifacts), and it doesn't really have half as much hours worth of unique content. That being said, it isn't offensively bad either, and I did derive some enjoyment out of it, so if you want a numbingly-simple spacesim to play for an hour or two during a slow evening, this game might be just about right.
I say the biggest entertainment value is the main plotline and the sidequests. The main plot is super simple, you can see most of the plot beats from miles away (though one plot reveal between the two leads did amusingly blindside me); it is also quite a bit scattered and full of digressions, the way I've been playing it - two hours an evening - I return to the game next evening and I wouldn't necessarily remember what I was doing yesterday (though the game gives you more than enough information to continue from where you left off). Nevertheless, it was mildly entertaining, occasionally somewhat funny. Voice acting is passable, sometimes good, in a few occasions really great, though the voicelines during the generic non-plot encounters, and during the occasional plot instances, will eventually get really grating. Sidequests provide some more of that mild entertainment value, and some extra worldbuilding. Yeah, worldbuilding, it is as simplistic as its plot, all races are one trick ponys, not something you'd build a DarkStar franchise upon (though Egosoft did manage to build a great franchise upon a similarly-simplistic foundation somehow).
The gameplay is equally as simplistic. In a lot of regards, the game plays like Elite, yes, the one from the year of 1984: the trading is the same shuttle runs between a producer and a consumer systems, and is barelly worth your effort; the inter-system travel works really similar, and even the part where there's one trading station per system at a fixed distance from the system entrypoint is practically the same. And you fly the same ship for the entire game, also like in Elite, though besides letting you buy and install several kinds of equipment and weapons, also works like an RPG character whom you occasionally level up to upgrade and unlock special abilities, which really isn't all that an entertaining addition to the genre to be frank. You can't upgrade everything in one playthrough, but the level-up paths themselves are not all that distinct so you wouldn't conceivably want to give this game a second playthrough.
The sandbox content of the game is so repetitive it gets old really fast. Besides the already-mentioned trading, you've got generic terminal missions - deliver cargo, retrieve cargo from an enemy, destroy the enemy, take a couple photos, listen in on a conversation - and every mission type plays out exactly the same scenario with no variation. There are pirate hideouts, which also play out exactly the same scenario and rewarding you with a slightly better version of a locally-produced gun. There's mining, which is about shooting at generic asteroids and occasionally getting them to drop a sellable ware. And there are artifacts, which are essentially experience points for you to upgrade your ship with, and they are sourced in two places: either in systems occupied by pirates, which always involve you shooting at three waves of pirate ships; or in big asteroids, and this involves either flying to the asteroid and into its tunnels until you reach the big inner chamber where you'll find the artifact in exactly the same place, or just paying a smuggler on the trading station to get it for you instantly.
Most of the sandbox content rewards you with money, but just by getting every artifact, and fighting off every pirate who'd attack me, I had many times more money than I needed to buy everything that I need, so you don't even need to engage with most of the side content.
The game looks dated - by 2006's standards. Like seriously, my two points of reference from 2003 - X2 and Freelancer - technically and stylistically look better than this game. The ship and station designs are alright, but they are let down by the low resolution textures; technically, this game uses bump and specular mapping plus detail textures, plus occasional animated texture, but their resolution is so low that it all just looks like blurry mess. And the "nebulas" in this game is just a colored tint with blur applied to it, not even Z-buffer fog.
The music is somewhat generic but quite alright, though the dramatic horns that blow whenever you encounter pirates are ridiculous. Otherwise, there's nothing memorable about the soundscape of the game.
