FTL: Advanced Edition

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.

Difficult but very satisfying when you overcome the challenges.

One of my all time favorite games. It's incredibly challenging, but it is beatable (at least on easy and normal). This game is definitely easy to learn and difficult to master. The story and random events add a lot and the atmosphere is perfect. I really felt like a small ship's captain on the run from a nefarious rebel fleet. This game has incredible replay value, some of the best I've ever experienced. Each ship plays differently and each game evolves based on the random weapons and upgrades you find along the way, requiring significant strategic choices. The resource system is done beautifully, so that there's never quite enough scrap, and each decision of what upgrade to buy is incredibly important and meaningful. There are also well crafted mods.

I love this game. The degree of engagement one can get with their ship is immense, and when you look at it from the outside, the game is so simple! 2D graphics, a few lines of text, yet it feels like so much more. The writing is really top notch. Outside of some curious coincidences when a refueling outpost you save thanks you with everything but fuel, the immersion is unbroken. The game balance is just right. Play on easy if you want the story, play on normal if you want a challenge, and on hard? I've not dared... yet. The best thing about it has to be the replayability. You can go back in with the same ship and face an entirely different challenge, because the taste of each run is decided by how you equip your ship, and your options depend on the RNG. Some of the quests(United Federation & Ancestry unlock missions for example) feel really luck based and I would suggest getting them done on easy if you fail repeatedly and they start annoying you.