So, I've played SPAZ for 62 hours (felt like more) and SPAZ 2 for 16.2 (just finished the story, felt like less time though.

I loved SPAZ, a simple game where the more grind you put in, the more you got out, simple (seemingly) mechanics meant for a lot of fun, collecting the different ships, weapons, techs becoming more and more powerful and so on.

If you expect SPAZ 2 to be just a brand new SPAZ, don't buy it, yet. While 2 looks a lot nicer in everyway, I found it to be disappointing in comparison to the original.

So why do I recommend it? Because SPAZ 2 is still enjoyable, just not as much as the original, which was a lot of fun.

Pros of SPAZ 2:

-Looks awesome.
-Battles are more fun to take part in, more tactics involved.
-Changing your ship on-the-fly, if there are bits floating around.
-Story is ok. Meh. It's funny. To be honest the storyline was never a big thing for me in this or the first, it's ok though.

Cons of SPAZ 2 (I havn't done sandbox mode yet, so some of these may be my lack of knowledge of the game):

-Rez. Flying around eats rez, a lot of rez (may be the amount of stuff in my inventory?) which makes traveling around quite a pain, as you're reduced to slow speed most of the time.
-Inventory system. While being able to change on-the-fly is good, it should be a damn sight easier and pain free when you are doing it out of combat. While your parts are sort of nicely organised, it quickly becomes a pain if you collect too many.
-Simplicity. Ok, this may be a comparision to the original, but it's my feeling. In the original you could have a number of random timed events you could take part in, not so here, in the original you built up from a small ship to a massive one, not here (ok, you start off with less cores, but when you consider you started in somthing smaller than your current strike craft, the size difference is not that much.) In the original you had to plan where you spent skills, so you would buy weapons etc to become highly specialsed in your ships, here, it doesn't really matter.
-Items. It becomes quite a pain later in the game trying to find the ship parts you want, my base at a threat level of 70+ and a major trade hub never got better than 2 star stuff, and rarely any good, which ment I would have to travel everywhere to find the good stuff.
-Zombies. Yeah, not really dangerous once I actually started fighting them (good planning partly), but it became a pain trying to wipe them out. They would respawn quicker than kill them all, and my guys weren't all that bothered defending their stations.
-Needs more than 4 mother ships in battle. Seriously, late game, big battles would be so much better. You lose a lot of tactics as you either have to kite because you are out numbered, charge in when you outnumber them, or can charge right in when even, as they aren't much of a threat =/

All in all an enjoyable game, which is certainly on track to being an excellent sequel (in large part as the devs are active in the discussion), but as of yet, has some way to go. But it's early access, which gives me hope!