Playing Elite : Dangerous for the last few days. My thoughts:
I've been playing it for the last few days. Pretty good all around. I've been playing as a trader and doing ok.
Definitely sandbox, no story anywhere to be seen. Seems like you can freely swap between trading, and fighting (to collect bounties, be a mercenary, a pirate, etc). Mining is not available right now as far as I can tell.
Different ships lend themselves to differing roles nicely and you can have multiple ships. You can upgrade individual ship components, though there are limits.
Controls can be a bit annoying. Flight controls use asdw and mouse, while textual control panels use asdw (and if you use the mouse, it will send you into a spin). Finally there are some textual controls that allow for a mouse(market place, galactic map).
Visually it does very well, though there is a tendency to reuse the space station types.
Downsides... sometimes it takes a very long time to get to places. Jumping between systems drops you at the primary sun for the system. Then you have to hypserspace over to the station you want to deal with. One of the systems I have to deal with has two suns, and they are not anywhere close to one another... stopped trading there because of the time investment.
Interdiction... So NPCs and PCs can stop you while you are in hyperspace between ports. When this happens there is a minigame where you must point your ship in the right direction long enough to escape. If you don't you are dropped out of warp, and likely attacked. Annoying but I can see the PVP needs for it. Just means I can't top off my drink while going on a long trek.
I also don't like the fact that when I go to undock it must spin my transport pad around for me although there really is no call for it.
Overall a game you should play if you like space games like Descent, Wing Commander, Freelancer, EVE Online, you will likely enjoy this.
I think Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous are going to be two very good games, for different reasons.
Also you pay for Elite once with some additional micro purchases like skins for your ships etc. No subscription as yet.