There are a lot of options once docked at a port: you can look at the Trade goods; enter the port's Bar, where you can hire fighter escorts for your ship to give you a little extra protection, Gamble your money in the hopes of making extra cash by betting on power sled races, or watch the Holovid, which will give you news on what's going on within the galaxy; you can outfit your ship with a ton of different types of equipment, like an IFF decoder, which can tell hostile ships from friendly on radar display, gravimetric sensors, which can tell large ships from small on radar display, an escape pod, larger cargo space, better weapons and armor, and many others; or you can buy a brand-new ship altogether.

Any of your ships will have some capacity for combat, but there are better models for this than others; you might want instead to spend your money on a hefty freighter and hire escorts to do your fighting for you. There's also a trade-off between speed, armor, maneuverability, and other factors that will weigh heavily on your mind. There are vessels for every game plan, and you always have the option to trade-in your current ship toward the purchase of a new one.

If you want to get into the combat side of things -- the different levels of which are always available -- you have a wealth of options to choose from. You can choose from a wide variety of base ship models, and outfit them to your liking, but you will always have to compromise between elements like carrying capacity, speed, armament types, hull strength, etc. To equip some of the heavier ordnance requires purchasing licenses, such as Heavy Weapons and Missile Weapons, but sometimes you'll find the extra cash layout more than worth your while -- those pirates are everywhere.

Combat itself is confined to the 2D plane, but that makes it no less hectic and exciting, as actual space flight is definitely in the "Babylon 5" motif, rather than the "Star Wars" style. Firing in one direction while flying in another takes some getting used to, but pulling off a victory this way can be much more fulfilling than the standard Hollywood dogfight in space we usually get.

It's difficult to encapsulate just the size and complexity of EV Nova in a thousand-plus words, but picking up the demo, which offers a fully functional trial of 30 days, should be enough to convince you that this is a game worth owning.