"But why?"
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SPAZ 2 went in a wildly different direction and I have no idea what became of it as I played it briefly on release and gave up. But it was still in development with a lot of major changes apparently happening so I can't comment on if its good or not now.
SPAZ 1 however is a top down shooter, but its a lot more strategic and exploration based than that genre would normally mean. You build a ship that fits what you want to do, and go out and do missions to build rep and either buy better/different ships for different needs or progress deeper into the story. Its very arcadey, in that most stuff is contained to the galaxy you are in and you basically jumped through treating them as "levels" with only like an hours worth of anything in each one. Though its been a decade so my memories might be a little degraded so I can't give you reliable detailed stuff.
Its pretty similar to Starsector, the quintessential slav jank space game that I'm sure you know of. But if you haven't just go with that as its essentially the "better" version of SPAZ 1 because it wasn't quite as Indie developed.
I actually liked a bunch of the reviews I heard for SPAZ 2, but I'll give SPAZ 1 a shot the next time I see it on sale. I was never a fan of top-down shooters (mostly because I was never good enough to play even halfway through stuff like Geometry Wars, even if it was beautiful. But if there's more of an exploration and building aspect, it might be fun.
The reviews did say SPAZ 2 seemed wildly different from SPAZ 1. It seems like they have totally distinct audiences. I too, am not sure why. They do sound vaguely similar, but they're abjectly different as far as the audience is concerned.
Yeah I can't say if 2 is good or not, as I picked it up on release and even during the short weeks I played it it was almost changing entire genres as they scrapped ideas. I've never gotten around to going back, though I probably should at some point.
But yeah, 1 was very different. Its 2d instead of 3d, so you can actually know what's going on half the time and not be constantly missing due to some Z-axis nonsense. And the sectors were localized, so you could just play in short bursts without having to think about the entire galaxy at once and accidentally getting yourself in a death spiral where you are forced to restart the entire game from scratch to escape.
Either way, its regularly on sale for a dollar. So even if you don't end up liking 1, you aren't going to be out of much.