Nomad

The Good
The fact that the first person you meet in the game, an Arden, looks like a talking giant otter seriously prejudiced me in favor of the game. Even without that, I have immense fun going around bartering for items from the various races. If you find the good or goods that a particular race especially wants, then you can rip them off royally. Be careful, though; the AI is perfectly capable of doing the same to you. Not all of the races will tell you what they want out of a trade. Sometimes it's not obvious at all whether you came out ahead in a trade or not. This is actually good in this case. You have a cargo-hold full of Molso Meal? Ouch. You've just been suckered. Some might rank that a flaw, but when the AI in a trading game tries to trick me, I have to congratulate the designers on complexity.

The combat system is easy to use, if a bit overly-simplistic. There's only a half-dozen controls and they're all explained on the combat screen.

You can generate your own wealth by mining from planets, too, or you can steal from other planets. You can also use Arch-bots in archeological digs.

The Bad
No major problems, just a few minor nitpicks.
1) Very few of the cinematics are skippable, most notably the trading graphic, which will be seen a lot and takes a good half minute. 2) Enemies act much faster than you. It takes the player a good 10 seconds to lock onto an enemy if you're using anything shy of the best tracker, but enemies can do that in about 2 seconds regardless of their equipment. They also don't have nearly as long a reload time as you do. Unless you're extremely well equipped, going up against multiple enemies is suicidal. 3) The game has no scorecard of how good you are in trade. 4) There's no way to disable the main quest and/or the flow of time, so I can't focus on trading nearly as much as I'd like. This problem also means that mining from planets is nearly meaningless.

The Bottom Line
This is an extremely good game from the trading point of view, but it runs into problems since it tries to be a combat sim too. It has an excellent story, though, and the good parts outweigh the flaws by far.