Gave it a go. Beat it with all three ships.
It's almost a great game. Almost.
It has absolutely beautiful visuals, smart controls, and a radical conceptual approach to the traditional Wing Commander style of campaign that makes every run feel like an adventure.
But it's marred by poor game tuning, poor weapon balance, poor design decisions and a team that looks like it's too exhausted to clean up the product and get it out of Alpha. I'm going to wait for their next major update (slated sometime this month, maybe) before making a final call, but that's where I'm leaning. It is full of great ideas that have failed to gel largely because of the "little things", like getting weapons and combat tuned correctly.