This a pretty soft recommend. Its almost a neutral or maybe a soft non-recommendation, but a lot of the issues I have with the game stem from quality of life things that could be improved within a few patches.

Keeping it simple, Per Aspera is a very pretty game with some really good gameplay and sound design. I spent a lot of the time that I played the game simply looking at the landscape and watching the water or grass slowly spread across the planet. I also found the voice acting to be very refreshing. Troy Baker in particular did a wonderful job as Dr. Nathan Foster and honestly I found myself wishing he would talk more. The gameplay loop is very enjoyable as well and reminds me a lot of games like Satisfactory or Factorio. Build more mines and factories to expand the base, to find more resources, to build more mines and factories, to support more colonists, to research more things, to build better mines and factories... and also terraform the planet. One of the things that I think is worth mentioning is that I thought it was pretty neat watching how your road system develops. The game will auto-draw roads based on the best possible path between nodes, which ends up giving you some pretty cool spider-web-esque designs. Finally as, far as the story goes, I'd say it's pretty good. Without spoiling anything, it doesn't end up being as straight forward as you might think. Although it seems mostly linear, the game gives you a few options how to steer AMI on her mission to terraform Mars so you don't feel entirely on rails.

All that good stuff being said, allow me to address some of the things I didn't like. I should also mention that I haven't fully completed the story, but that is mostly because of the issues I have with the game.
Again, keeping it simple, the story comes off as feeling very disjointed once you get into the late game. I ran into multiple times where characters would be conversing with AMI as if they were friends, despite having not yet met them. One good example being where I was pretty well into the endgame, having just made a pretty drastic choice with big implications, only to have a voice communication occur that was very obviously from the early/mid game. This is more than likely due to the open nature of the game, but the mission objectives don't exactly do a good job of pointing you towards where you should go.
This would be pretty forgiveable if the gameplay held up as well, but frankly it doesn't. Towards the mid game you start noticing that resources aren't being sent where they need to go as efficiently as they should be, thus factories and colonies aren't being supplied, lowering your productivity and research. A fair bit of this can be attributed to poor worker hub layout and a poor understanding of how workers interact with each other, but again the game doesn't really explain it to you that well. So much of it is trial and error, and even then you can only do so much. Hyperloops and road upgrades can help mitigate the logistics crisis you inevitably fall into, but road upgrades are so tedious and the late game so vast, that you eventually just run out of capacity.
There are also a ton of minor things that irk me. Why can I not paint an area to upgrade my roads? Why can I not upgrade my worker hubs to support more drones? Why can I not choose what areas worker hubs service? Why is it that building tool tips keep popping up and blocking me while I'm trying to place buildings? What is with the AI building roads at extreme angles and through buildings when it could obviously go straight? And the big one, why do I not get refunded the resources spent upgrading roads when I delete the building they were connected to and, consequently, the roads along with it?

As I said, this game is wonderful. There is a certainly a lot to love about it and I can definitely see this evolving into a series that I come back to over the years. I just think there's some tinkering to be done in the tutorial, story progression, and gameplay department to get it over some of these bumps.

As a final rating, I'd say wait for a sale on this one.