Note: I played this on the Switch primarily. This was a disappointing game. Like so many roguelikes, it has an interesting atmosphere and a wide variety of weapons and tactics with which you can progress through the levels. Ranged, deployables, melee - lots of options. What it also has - that virtually every other roguelike has as well - is cage match bosses in tiny areas where the only thing that will let you win is twitch reflexes and high DPS. Better hope you didn't choose a weapon with a slow animation; better hope you're good at dodging. You're not going to win any other way. Plus there are input handling issues - mostly unpredictable latency - which make the twitch gaming aspect less than enjoyable. I never quite knew if I'd roll in time, which made battles nerve racking since every moment felt like a gamble. Plus there are weird problems like enemy melee attacks penetrating walls (when yours can't) or homing attacks from off screen (which is worse when there's a rather large cooldown between dodges) so you can dodge right into something which ruins your streak - or kills you. Great idea, superficially good execution. Scratch the surface even a little, though, and that veneer of polish wipes off like fresh paint.
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.
I can't say enough good things about this game. The storyline is equal to anything I've ever seen in 30 years of gaming; the controls and gameplay are tight and well designed; the levels, enemies, encounters, and characters are all interesting and interact well together. The plot, especially, is notable for one simple fact: it is one of the very few family-oriented stories I've seen in gaming that was written by someone who actually "gets" what family means. I don't mean "family friendly" ... there are some very tragic events and the game does not shy away from violence or death; what I mean is that it's about an intact family - a rarity in gaming no matter the genre - and how they have to pull together in order to battle a perplexing evil that threatens the world. Beyond that, every single character moves, attacks, and even dodges differently. They all are devastating when used correctly, but switching from one to another can be disorienting (in a good way) because it very much feels like "switching bodies". The difficulty curve is pleasant. Not "3hard5u" try-hard difficult, but unless you're relatively skilled you'll die a lot until you gain some levels. It does have some beautifully nasty traps and enemy combinations - nothing truly unfair, but stuff that'll melt your health if you aren't quick on the uptake. The graphics are amazingly expressive and distinctive for the pixel style; animations are fluid and well designed; sound effects are good; the music is better. Just buy it.
These bucolic life/farm sim type games aren't hard to get right. Throw the player into a pretty environment, add a basic laber/money sink loop with upgrades, and add characters to build virtual relationships with. Throw in a plot to give the whole thing some reason for existing and bam! you've got a game. This game fails pretty hard at things that aren't even remotely difficult to get right. Probably because the developers were more interested in gossamer thin allegory and flat out preaching than they were in making a good game. The basic plot conflict reads like a rabid Fern Gully fan played Rune Factory and decided to mash the two together while removing everything that made either one interesting. The characters are implausible and stiff with token lifestyle choices. I guess that's good in the realism department, because every single interaction you have with them is transactional. Building relationships is just another chore you do, and every unlocked interaction is going to preach to you about the value of tolerance or diversity in some fashion. Yes, lord, let this humble peon labour for the privilege of being brainwashed. The gameplay loop itself is more tedium and the upgrades essentially bring you up to the "this is where I should have been when the game started" level. The dungeon segment is boring and anything but challenging. At least we'll always have Rune Factory.
Plodding, boring. Everything about this game is as "middle of the road" as humanly possible. Combat is so slow paced it's not even remotely interesting to watch or engage in. The only real challenge comes when an enemy lands on top of you that's significantly more powerful. That usually just ends with you dying instantly, but at least it's not "sleep until you win". There is no minimum distance, so this happens frequently. The hazards are just stupid. One negates shields. Okay. One drains hull. Okay. One is asteroids which damage you if you touch them. But you can't move fast enough to avoid them and weapons won't target them so it's really like a shield+hull drain sector. Upgrades don't make weapons more interesting, just more powerful. There's nothing innovative about any of the weapons and many upgrades have "tradeoffs" which are a desperate attempt to shoehorn any kind of variety into the upgrade process. Even the fastest combat speed is plodding and it resets to the slower speed every time you encounter an enemy. Random star system layouts mean sometimes you run into enemies that can kill you before you can warp out before you've gotten any salvage. Other times you get tons of upgrades first. There is absolutely no progression I can see aside from unlocking bigger ships and higher difficulties which is really just "they do more damage". This game is to space strategy sims what La Croix is to soda pop.
