FTL: Faster Than Light

This is a hard review to write, in part because it took me almost a decade to do so. If there was an option to do so I would put this down as a neutral review as I do think there is a good reason it has become so beloved since its release. I want, so hard to like FTL and yet, 100 hours in I realise that if anything it made me frustrated rather than rewarded by the time I put into it. The game has a good idea, a good ‘core loop’ but is let down by the frustrating randomness that at times cripples you in ways that feel entirely out of your control. As with a lot of rogue-like games one tends to snowball and any upset to that early in the game will compound in the opposite direction, making you constantly weaker as enemies continually grow in strength. The controls in the form of real-time-with-pause encourage gameplay that often frustrates with specific timings needed to bypass enemy shields and certain weapons just wipe the floor with enemies while others are barely a tap. My biggest gripe is I think with overall balance, especially with the mother ship fight at the end of the game. Up to this point there are no larger enemies, no multi-stage fights and entire new mechanics are thrown at you in a way that feels out of scope with things that you have found up until that point. I think it’s an interesting game but I do just wish there was a more refined second version out there that worked with and improved upon some of the less enjoyable mechanics.

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.

About 14 years after it is finally time to post my review. The game is crap with astronomically high difficulty. It starts dead simple and goes directly to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ near the end. It is not getting "normal" near the end when you play on "easy". No, it's highway from one button to way to much unavoidable ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is beign thrown out by unhitable ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. And that's on "easy", 14,7% got achievement for getting hit 5 times in a row with maxed out evasion. As a name implied "astronomically low chance" my ass. Game of chance my ass, that is a crappy casino.

Incredibly fun, incredibly hard. Lot of charm and fun lore.

玩了两个小时，看了眼发售时间释然了，作为12年的游戏思路和系统也太超前了，音乐也很不错。但是，啊，但是，放在现在这体验纯粹的坐牢： 什么叫我去帮一下平民被跳帮了 什么叫对面闪避了我的六发激光 什么叫我让我的外星人船员和同族人交流后他就被杀了 什么叫无人的空间站突然爆了把我船员带走了 什么叫我去做个任务我的船员叛变了 什么叫一发导弹直接把我医疗仓干出了四块火 什么叫任务要求我不打爆船结果磨到一格血都不求饶 什么叫对面跳帮过来6个近战单位直接爆了我的引擎 建议是老老实实开个简单难度先学会基本运营和操作，然后用更好的初始舰船去玩，不然真得被一些随机负面事件整红温。

I can say with confidence that you shouldn't buy this. Like most other people who don't like the game, I think the rng completely ruins the experience. Don't listen to the people stating that there's individuals with win streaks of 90 or whatever, because immediately after telling you you're just bad they'll tell you to learn every single detail of any event and essentially memorize the wiki to actually enjoy the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ it'll throw at you. If you want a good rougelike, play TBOI, Mewgenics, Enter the Gungeon, or the Void War demo in particular if you want something similar without the unfair events and inconsistent difficulty. The worst part about this game is that you only realize that you want a refund after you out more than a few hours in. Please read reviews, even negative ones. If I did, I wouldn't have wasted 10 dollars on this crap.