FTL: Advanced Edition

Hmm, I cannot find my review that I made a year ago, so here it is again. Your success depends not on skill, but on pure random chance. This "game" is little more than a lottery of random events. You travel the galaxy from point to point. At each point something random happens (half the time it's an enemy ship attacking you). If you get mostly beneficial random events, if the game decides to give you resources you need to upgrade your ship, than you win. If not, than you lose. And you have little say in how to upgrade your ship. Want to launch drones? Well, have to randomly wander the map, with random events that will randomly (the same event can have completely opposite outcomes each time you get) give you resources or destroy your ship. Usually they destroy your ship. A "game" — it's not actually a game — for masochists with a lot of free time. Gets two stars for the art.

One of the things I hate the most in any genre is what I refer to as "bait and switch" gameplay. This is when a game presents you with multiple possible upgrade/gameplay paths - usually advertising them in the ad copy - but most of them are useless for actually beating the game. The last boss in FTL is designed to require a pure combat setup. You cannot use many techniques that work in other situations; it can't be boarded or anything clever like that. You will not know this until you reach the end. That means that lots of options you get aren't really options, they're just irrelevant fluff that you have to ignore. The other thing I'm not fond of is using an RNG as a way to create fake difficulty. Real difficulty is creating interesting problems or situations that require fast or deep thinking to resolve. Fake difficulty is "an encounter appears! click a button and find out if you die or not" and that is exactly what we see in FTL over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. In FTL the RNG is god. The RNG is life. The RNG decides if you live or die. And I mean that in both the "big" and "small" senses. You can be ROYALLY screwed in seemingly innocuous encounters if your guns decide they just don't want to hit the enemy that round. You can scum around that one. What you can't scum around is when the RNG decides that you simply won't find necessary upgrades before the last boss. If you don't have good weapons and good shielding, you WILL DIE. So good luck with that. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't enjoy games where the game gets to randomly decide if it's possible to win or not before I even start a run.

Can't stop playing. Don't buy this if you like free time.

One of the best space theme game ever. For me , IMO. Every ingridient is absolutely polished . This game worth every penny !

Very addictive game! p.s. info for linux and mac users - it works well in wine 1.3.37