FTL: Faster Than Light

Maybe writing a review for a wildly popular, decade-plus old game is a futile exercise, but that sign won't stop me, because I can't read! FTL is a perfect game. You should buy it and play it. Thank you for your time.

面白いけど難しい　EASYしかやってない ラスボスはばか　ばかです

Not a bad game at all, but definitely not my kind of game, nor is it one I would recommend. It's somehow both incredibly slow, yet the most stressful strategy roguelike I've ever played. The runs are often very long, and you are BRUTALLY punished for making even the slightest error, or not perfectly understanding a mechanic in the game. Losing a run at the end feels really bad since you spend over 2 hours on each one, trying to optimize and prepare as much as you can. Despite that, the game is designed to be painfully difficult, and losses being very common. I COMPLETELY understand failed runs being a good teacher for learning mechanics, but often runs in FTL are lost due to something happening in the early game and not realizing it's an issue, then dying, and not knowing WHY you were you taken out so quickly that time, when every previous fight you demolished the enemy. The result being the player thinking, "Well, what was I SUPPOSED to do there?", instead of thinking, "Damn, my bad. I got greedy there." I so desperately wanted to like this game, because every time I see someone playing it I think how fun it looks and how much I should give it another go. Then I play it, having a great time at first, only to be hit with repeated failed runs.

Year after year after year, this game just feels so good to return to. Love the gameplay, love the music, love the absolutely brutal difficulty.

Space-themed digital casino for insufferable people. Zero skill once you get the basics down. I've had some memorable runs and I can see why it was influential when it came out but I think it has been definitively eclipsed by the games it inspired. Combat is just weapon A to take out the shields and weapon B to do damage while the shields are down. I know the developers agree with this because that is how every single ship is laid out with minor differences in how the specific weapons work. This is the type of rock-paper-scissors ♥♥♥♥ Stellaris included specifically to make you NOT care about the minutia of combat and focus on the logistics and grand strategy instead. You just hit shields, hit weapons, hit shields over and over, occasionally dealing with boarders or burst spam. Even repairing or boarding is just clicking on whichever nonessential crewmate is closest or has the highest health. Anything in this game that doesn't outright kill you is just shallow busywork to draw out the fights for no reason, there's no sense of actually overcoming individual obstacles through your own skills, its just either you get to the next beacon or you don't. This brings me to the combat RNG which is just the actual worst thing imaginable. Xcom or Stellaris at least give you an evasion percentage for some type of closure, here you just have to memorize the different ship types by vibe. Constantly missing everything compounds with the RPS approach to shields since if your missile misses (which makes zero sense given the thrust-to-weight ratio of a tiny missile compared to a ship) then your lasers will just bounce off the shields through no fault of your own. It's so steeped in RNG that even winning fights doesn't feel good because you understand how arbitrary the evasion mechanic is, you win when the game randomly decides all of their shots miss and lose when the game randomly decides all of your shots miss instead. The whole systems thing doesn't even offer any depth either because again the safest approach is to take out weapons after either shields or helm. All of the damage is so linear too, you just click on the thing until it stops working and then move on to clicking on the next thing. Both this and the RNG could have been greatly improved if missing a shot could have randomly deflected it onto a different part of the ship instead for you to then take advantage of whatever unexpected opportunity that opens up, but this isn't a game about ending up on the backfoot and working your way back up through skill. As I alluded to the weapon selection is very narrow since its all either weapon A or weapon B, occasionally with some antipersonnel stuff. You do get hard counters like ion shields or defense drones, but there is almost no way to predict where you'll encounter them and certainly no way to gear around taking them out specifically, since any new weapons have to be offered at random from shops so there really is just zero player expression in making builds you just choose whatever is the most powerful. You're not finding new and creative ways around the mechanics, you're just finding slightly different ways of doing the same thing but with higher numbers to keep up with the arbitrary difficulty curve. I've heard people praise the enemy ships for using the same metagamey tactics that a player might use but I can confirm this is patent BS because for every untouchable defense drone-using ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I've encountered just as many crayon eaters with nothing but a beam weapon and a beam drone. Again the game just randomly decides if its going to give you a playable seed or not your own creativity and skill be damned. The only exception to this is beam weapons, which actually reward lateral thinking in a way that focuses the game on the players skills rather than dice rolls, which I KNOW THE DEVELOPERS AGREE WITH because for some reason the beam weapons have 100% accuracy? The Adjudicator ends up feeling like something from a completely different game because its like the developers came up with the idea of beams and correctly surmised that focusing on player creativity is incongruent with a reliance on RNG in combat, but then just added the beams wholesale without any reflection on what that type of approach to game design would say about the rest of the combat. All of this compounds horribly with the resource side. Missiles have finite ammo, which makes the complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ disdain for the player displayed by the evasion system even more apparent, but this pales in comparison to how horrible scrap is as a currency. To give the abridged run-down you need to use scrap to repair, then use scrap to upgrade systems, then use scrap to buy ammo and fuel, then to buy weapons, then to upgrade the reactor. Everything that doesn't net you more scrap is an immediate setback. You can't minmax into different resources for the risk-reward you have to centralize everything around what the game tells you to centralize around. The repair mechanic also makes retreats or phyrric victories feel horrible since you will either take a bunch of chip damage for no benefit or you blow all of the scrap you earn on just getting your ship back into a usable state. It's crazy that everyone talks about bringing runs back from the brink when everything is geared so that once you *start* losing you will *keep* losing until the game randomly decides to give you a good event. It pretends to be open and organic while actually railroading you down a grueling death-march of happenstance and constantly dwindling resources. To plagiarize a youtuber it's the type of ♥♥♥♥ Pathalogic pulls in order to make you question wth you are doing by playing it. High-skill gameplay is fun because its making you live through the consequences of your past actions, both good and bad. FTL does everything in its power to keep you actions from mattering. It will throw overpowered hard-counter random fights at you for five jumps and then randomly trigger the one event of the engi surrendering 80 scrap to you for free. This game doesn't want you to work forward from where you are through your own skill and cleverness, it wants you to sit with your thumb up your ass until it randomly decides to give you the resources its been punishing you for not having the entire run. And look I know 30 hours isn't the most, I've heard about how high the winrates get when you play to the probability, but at this point I question why I should even care about my ability to win when the game clearly doesn't. Story and world are garbage as well, being ironically cliche doesn't make you less cliche guys. Also very little emergent narrative of the sort you get with other strategy games of this type. My brother in christ the alien crewmates don't even have alien names they're all just named alexander or bob. The enemy captains you meet have unique names sometimes, was it really not in the budget to throw together some quick namelists? The flavour is hardly even there either because all your weapons fire automatically, so the crew you're supposed to be getting attached to are apparently just trained monkeys keeping the electronics running long enough for the ship computer to do all of the actual work. You yourself are not even playing as the captain or anything, you're just some nebulous collective consciousness without any direct involvement.

Needs a difficulty disclaimer. Not a thing you play to rest or have fun.

I love the pixel art, the story, and the overall feel of the game. However, I feel like most of the times I lose it's because of the RNG. Random events shouldn't be this punishing.