You need to be the kind of person who likes crafting progression in itself. I enjoyed for a good while, chasing better upgrades, building a base and slowly building up a glossary to understand the aliens, but it's definitely not for everyone, and it's more wide than it's deep for sure.

Maybe it's because I got into it late but I actually liked the exploration between planets. While a lot of them are effectively interchangeable in resources, there's a lot of interesting environments and creatures that are created by its procedural generation.