I bought starshatter.
It has abseloutely nothing in commun to SE4, think more of freespace. But good game, the dynamic campaigns are really a good move.
Graphics are ok, indeed air to ground are bad, but the rest is neat and clean, proportions are respected and the physic used is newtonian. It was a good buy.
As for Matrix games, it is for me a very respected publisher, its Steel Panters mega campaigns have been on my HD longer than SE4.
Only problem with Matrix was that their forum was a sad place, not very friendly, but I heard that they recently started to mass-clean it
.