I don't know any of the games you mentioned except Freelancer.
It's ok IMO.
The combat:
Big battles with dozens of ships are a bit hard to follow, but the overall control is pretty, you steer and fire with your mouse, making it easier to hit things.
However repairing in combat can be a pain, you have to keep track of your shields and hull, and also whether you have enough repair nanobots and shields recharge thingies. When i get my enemy lined up infront of me, i tend to forget to look at the dmg on my ship. But unless you're seriously outmanned (1 vs 5), you always have time to repair before you get killed.
You can salvage some parts/cargo of the blown up ships, and sell it at stations/planets. Sometimes you get a nice price for it, most of the time it's just spare change, maybe enough to reload your weapons.
Most of your money from combat comes by doing missions, which may get boring after while. Most of the time it comes down to blowing up a few enemy ships, with or without support from your employer.
Trading:
Haven't done this much yet. I didn't want to sell my nice Fighter for a Freighter just yet. However the good trade routes are usually a few systems apart, which is good i suppose, but the best routes are also in very hostile territory for me at the moment.
Some areas on the map are designated as mining areas, i'm not sure if you as a player can mine those areas, but it would be cool if it was possible.
Alignment:
There are a lot of factions in the game, these factions have other facitons as allies and enemies. Your alignment with those factions depends off course on your actions. You can only get missions from factions you have a positive alignment with, and in each system there are usually a few dominant factions.
The interface to view your alignment could be improved IMO to only show your alignment with the factions in your current system, instead of your alignment with ALL the factions you encountered.
Multiplayer:
Dunno, haven't tried it yet.
Overall:
At the moment i only use to get some nice action and some graphics (very nice graphics
), so i'm probably missing a lot of aspects of the game (like trading and maybe mining), i also don't pay too much attention to my alignment, which means that at the moment i'm playing as a good guy. There are some pirate factions, and i imagine they have some hidden bases you could use if your alignment with them was positive.
Another nice feature is that you can fly in formation with other groups of ships (traders + escorts for example).
What you can do is hail a transport/trader, and they'll tell you where they are going. If you want to go there, join their formation, and you'll be auto-piloted with their formation to wherever they are going. Off course, you could run into pirates along the way, forcing you to fight.
