FTL: Advanced Edition

One of the best games ever made, if you like space, "exploration" and roguelike this is the game

I've sunk several handfuls of hours into this game over the last couple of weeks, and it's incredible. Not based too much on luck and not based too much on skill, meaning that, like Spelunky, when you finally break through and win, it's a magical run that sticks with you for a long time. Plus, there are a bunch of unlockable ships and ship layouts, so there's a pretty swell amount of replay value added to the already significant replay value that naturally comes with rogue-likes. Easily one of my favorite games of the year. Buy it.

great start but a bit limited. feels like once when you do it once it gets a bit repetitive. needs a few more quests or story lines to make the game have a different feel each time your play.

I've won this on normal with a variety of ships, but in general I've found that with many ships you have absolutely no chance without a lot of luck. If you start off with a ship that doesn't have shields (or only has the Zoltan energy shield) and end up facing an enemy with beam weapons early on, you're going to get fried, and you'll have to start over. The game is fun, but it feels a little too random in that respect. Also, it eats through a wicked amount of batteries, it takes more power than Civ V. This stinks if you plan on using this as a fun game to play on your laptop while traveling.

The good: the music, the cutesy graphics, the beep-boop sounds. The bad: One of the worst designed games I have ever seen. Every single session without exception will converge on one particular loadout and set of tactics. To the extent you aren't using that loadout it's because you just haven't gotten the equipment or upgrades yet. It doesn't matter what unusual ship you start with; you always want to converge on the optimum as fast as you can. For example, if you start with the Rock ship - a missile-focused ship - you can't just keep using missiles, because you use them about twice as fast as you find new ones, so if you don't swap out for normal weapons fairly quickly you end up dead in space with no more ammo. Similar issues apply to all the other alternate loadouts: they're cute ideas but don't balance against the optimum. Random encounter details don't matter; you want to fight, because fighting gives you more scrap and you need scrap to get all good upgrades. So it totally doesn't matter what the specifics of any encounter are; jump in, click through text, fight. And every fight plays out the exact same way. If there were alternative viable tactics against different ships that would help, but no: every single fight is the same, just with a scaling difficulty in terms of enemy power. Game becomes EXTREMELY repetititve. The end of the game reinforces this problem. You simply cannot beat the boss ship without using the optimal loadout. There are no alternate tactics or approaches to it. A comparatively minor but still annoying problem is the plotline (warning, minor spoilers): having desperately spent however-many spacejumps staying barely ahead of the enemy, your beat-up scout ship finally reaches a friendly naval base, who then informs that not only must said beat-up scout ship take on the most powerful ship in the galaxy, but the navy for which you've been busting your butt is going to refuse to help you in any meaningful sense whatsoever.