The player ship rotates, but it only is 'rendered' at a handful of angles. This is a very common technique, but here they've used an art style to make it look like realtime 3d.
It's like stun runner on Lynx [1]. The Arcade stun runner was polygon based; but the Lynx doesn't have a chance, so there's just a ton of sprite options for rotation and a lot of work to make it look the part [2].
[1] https://youtu.be/4PEAzBtaStk?si=QXWf9KDUBjQRgoDh&t=204 [2] https://forums.atariage.com/topic/194231-lynx-stun-runner-3d...