FTL: Advanced Edition

This game can simply destroy you in easy mode in 20 minutes so you've to pay attention on what exactly is happening. I loved it 3 years ago, I love it still. One of my favorite rogue-likes.

I LOVE the idea of this game, flying through space, managing a crew, aquiring components and upgrading your ship as you go, coming across other ships to battle or other space wayfarers and interacting with them. I just have trouble with the difficulty. Maybe I am missing something, a lot of my friends have beaten the game. I bought it when it first came out and have still not beaten it. I don't have many hours in it, since I usually get frustrated and just stop playing. Oh, also a simply AMAZING sound track. Overall, solid game even though I suck at it.

I normally don't like rogue-likes but this one is better than most for several reasons: - Playthroughs only last a few hours at most. - There's three difficulty levels. If you're not experiences in this kind of games, Easy difficulty is pretty good. There's challenge but as you learn your chances of winning increase considerably. - Advanced mode is optional. You can wait until you master the original version before taking on the more complex full experience. - Realtime battles with optional pausing are pretty fun.

Make no mistake about it, FTL is painfully unfair in anything but Easy mode (and, frankly, it's sort of too easy in Easy mode sometimes). My first hour and a half of play with the base ship and no upgrades, when I stubbornly refused to stop playing Normal mode, was defined by death after death after unavoidable death. Boarded by 6 enemies at once with only three crew members to hopelessly fight them? Check. Multiple, unstoppable fires caused by an overpowered ship attacking me at random in the first sector? Check. O2 system destroyed many jumps away from the closest shop to repair it, impossibly dooming the whole crew? Check. Still, it's fun enough to throw a couple bucks at when it's on sale. There's no real consequence to your ceaseless deaths other than the annoyance it causes (in my best showing so far, I got to sector 6 on easy mode before an obscenely overpowered ship in a "distress" encounter wrecked my shields in one shot and lit the entire hull on fire on the second). If you can get over the fact that FTL's random nature is ridiculously cheap and comically unfair, each individual play-through is entertaining enough to keep coming back. Don't take it too seriously. You're going to die repeatedly to the wildly unfair mechanics. Unlike so many other games today that just rely on Skinner box mechanics to keep you playing to the next cool thing you acquire, the fun of FTL is in actually playing each encounter, even if that last encounter is essentially reduced to you being an ant under a magnifying glass.

It is infinitely replayable and although I have played only 35+ hours yet, it feels like I have been living in the FTL universe for the most of my life (which is a good thing). And on top of that, I kinda still suck at playing it, as normal difficulty is still a bit too difficult for me. So there’s enough ground left to cover for me. FTL is really easy to learn, but difficult to master. If you like these kinds of games, this one’s for you. To balance out the difficulty a bit, I sometimes save in a hacky way (somewhere around sector 5) by backuping the save files. Btw, the music fits the atmosphere so perfectly!