Hello !
First, your game has a cool premise, the whole "Journey through space alone with mysteries to uncover" gig sounds pretty great !
Then, there's a lot of ambitious goals you're setting for your game, which is equally great and promising !
I'll admit that I have some reserves on the visual choices, however. My problem is that there's three layers which really don't connect together for me.
In the game background, you have these ultra-realistic "Space simulator" assets, with an extremely detailed Planet Earth or, in the last picture, galaxy (for instance) : that's our first layer.
Then, you have this very basic and simplistic hub showcasing the different informations the player needs to know, that's kind of floating over the lower part of the screen. On its own, it's not bad, but the contrast with the scenery behind is very vivid and off-setting for me, as if you had an actual spacecraft, but with commands from a 2000s space exploration video game instead of actual ones. That's our second layer.
And THEN, you have the actual interactive elements : the asteroids, the lasers you can shoot, the little explosions...
To me, graphically, they're a real issue, because they're very rough and unpolished-looking, and very unrealistic in aspect, and that simply blends horribly bad with the super-realistic background and the already out of tune command board. When you have, in the same screen, Planet Earth assets that actually seem like you're looking at the real thing from space and, at the same time, asteroids and lasers that make Spore look like an AAA graphics game (and Spore came out 9 years ago)...that's not only confusing and esthetically unappealing, but generally incoherent.
In my opinion, the game would greatly benefit from trying to find a definite visual identity and sticking to it. If you can model great definition assets in a fashion similar to Space Simulator (including upgrading the visuals for the cockpit and such !), that could really help bumping your game up a notch, or otherwise, I think you'd benefit from "downgrading" everything to a simpler, more stylized style (think Kerbal Space Program or, well, even No Man's Sky, except without the giant scam !) : there can be great games from simple graphics (and very beautiful ones too), and I feel like having visuals that are more coherent will help the player focus on the experience, story and action, as well as it'll coerce them into getting immersed into the game, haha.
Also, that's kind of a detail, but I think the assets you're using for explosions are very scientifically inaccurate. Explosions DO happen in space but, as a quick google search taught me, they operate in a very different way than they would on Earth. (And as a side note, you may wanna work on these asteroids INSTANTLY vanishing when they explode, that's a bit goofy if I can say so xD)
Then again, I AM a google scientist, and there's probably a lot of people on this site that would be more qualified than I am to discuss this topic, lmao
