It sucks, scoring a feeble 5 out of 10 in the UK games magazine PC Zone.

Choice quotes:

"The problem is the game itself. For a start it's bugged to hell. It took me about two days just to get the game to work for more than 20 minutes at a time without crashing back to Windows. If you can get past the bugs you soon see that while the potential for a mammoth game is there, the actual implementation \ufffd not to put too fine a point on it \ufffd sucks."

"Battlecruiser's biggest problem lies with Derek Smart himself. Several years ago the man had the kernel of a good idea, a plan to out-Elite Elite, to out-Wing Command Wing Commander, to out-Imperium Galactica... (we get the idea \ufffd Ed.). The only trouble was Smart wasn't quite as up to the task as he has led himself to believe.

Smart often boasts about the fact that his is a fully independent company, not beholden to publisher demands. However, one of the benefits of having a publisher can be the feedback that comes with the territory \ufffd developers often get too close to their products and can't see the flaws. Unfortunately, Smart simply hasn't taken on board anyone else's opinion or criticism and the game suffers as a result. Hence Battlecruiser comes off looking ill-thought-through, amateurishly coded and riddled with holes."

Now, this could be horseshit (my idea of a deep and cerebral game is Serious Sam played on the "Serious" skill level) but I've read too much elsewhere about this guy and his software to completely discard it.