FTL: Advanced Edition

I've heard that this is a fun game. It's not. The reward/upgrade/enemy strength balance is tilted far beyond the enemy's favor on normal difficulty. You will NOT be able to survive the third sector you travel through due to always having a ship that spams boarders on you while having superior shields and weaponry. 'Screw you' in game form.

Great game - simple mechanics, yet realy hard gameplay. Random events, that can kill your crew in five minutes, or let it go throught whole gallaxy, just to smash you by one extra hard battle near end - or let you live and win, actualy! Different ships, different races, all the ship's systems, all this make for great addictive game with what seems like unlimited possibilities. I would appreciate a save game feature, but that would be against nature of this game. Real gem.

I love FTL. I play it all the time. Although it can be hard and frustrating at times the game usually gives you some leeway and it will forgive you some mistakes. AE on the other hand is totally unbalanced. There are so many counters and counter-counters and counter-counter-counters...you just need every system. You cant survive without defense drone or hacking. In vanilla FTL sometimes there are ships you can't beat. For example you specialise in missiles and the enemy has two defense drones or you want to board but he has a big crew and a medbay. This happens maybew 2-3 times per playtrough. In AE I had this happen all the time. With the effect, that I did not get enough scrap for the essentials upgrades. FTL is a balance between frustration and fun but AE is just frustration. Its good that I still have the old installer on my drive. 5 stars for FTL and 1 star for AE = 3 stars

This is a game with a ton of fun mechanics, but also a bunch of terrible ones (or at least very poorly balanced). It has a lot of potential, and it's a real shame not to see it more fully realised, but it's worth playing anyway, if only to see if you can beat it before you can't help but give up in frustration instead. It has two elements that ultimately conflict; namely a scarcity of resources that has you moments away from going adrift or being unable to repair hull damage, but combines this with a high degree of randomisation that means that winning the game is all about beating the odds, rather than any actual player skill. If stores stocked a few items with more consistency (like the cloning lab and recovery arm) then things wouldn't be so bad, but as it stands the randomisation serves to make the game very, very frustrating, even on normal difficulty!

This game is really good however what brings it down for me is the pace. You see in reality this game is just about moving your ship from the left side of the map to the right side. You have to do it kinda of fast as the creeping black shadow is chasing you. This game could of been so much more fun if you could take your time to go more systems to trade and upgrade your ship for the coming battles. What you have here is more like, OK, whats my best route to the level exit point. This in turn makes the play feel rushed and the enemy only gets harder and harder. In the end it feels like this is more of a game of how long you can survive. I do know its Rogue-like and that's kinda the point of these games. However because its a fun and cool system I just wish its was more fleshed out and lasted longer. 2 1/2 stars