My wife and I played our first game of Exoplanets last night. We had fun. The game mat is ridiculously oversized but my wife liked it and wants to use it every time, so I guess it's not that bad. The typical Eurogamer penchant for making everything an icon you have to memorize or look up on a cheatsheet was intimidating at first, but in typical Euro fashion by the end of the game we mostly had it all worked out and things were moving smoothly.
We're still figuring out what's smart to do and what's dumb to do when playing the game, but we liked it and will definitely play more.