And it's 90% luck and 10% skill :(
It's a great game for sure, but the difficulty and your sheer mercy and the kindness of a VERY UNKIND RNG blemishes the game greatly.
I mean, has ANYONE honestly completed this?
Oh and "sdfg144" - way to go! What a fucking marvellous example of a good review!
This is not a roguelike. Its just not. You aren't controlling a single character, you aren't exploring a dungeon (or space station or whatever), and your character customization options aren't there.
This is, however, awesome.
It hits the right balance of combat, loot, and challenge. At first it seems like there's an obvious, optimum strategy, but as you get more weapons and tools and your enemies diversify, so do viable strategies.
It's also the kind of game prone to epic moments. In the game I played just before reading this, I was lucky enough to score a couple of mantis crewmates and built an unstoppable away team I went charging around with. Until I met the AI drone ship,. boarded, and promptly died from lack of oxygen. Whoops.
My only minor complaint is that useful information is sometimes hidden. I haven't upgraded my sensors yet, but if they don't tell you what the weapons on the enemy ship are, they should. The starmap also needs to have distances or star lanes always on, because I lost that game getting stuck in a cluster with no route to the exit like it seemed there should be.
I absolutely love the simulation aspect of this game: you really feel you are in a spaceship, with its crew bustling around while you, as captain, shout orders for Scotty to go repair the propulsion drive while the rest of the crew stand firmly on their jobs in order to get through yet another challenge in your quest. The space navigation, both in each system and in the larger scope, feel crips and engaging - if somewhat repetitive.
The gameplay, however, is badly tuned. I am a huge fan of roguelikes: I'm certain I've put more hours into them than half the people here, easily. I'm not stranger to their difficulty curves (both in learning and in play) nor their inherent randomness and all the ups and down that come with it. The major issue with FTL: Advanced Edition is its balance. Unless you're playing easy (which, really is not what a hardcore roguelike fan would), the strategy pretty much boils down to finding a good scenario early on. If you do, you're set. If you don't, it's game over, no matter how good your strategy is.
Roguelikes (and procedural games in general) should be informed by randomness, not dictated by it. A player with a solid strategy shouldn't lose a game because of a single overpowered encounter even when he immeditaly decides to run away ("make an FTL jump") and this happens way too often on FTL. In fact, that's what the gameplay is about. Even the best strategy is 80% at the sole will of what the RNG will put in his way, for good or bad, and while this makes FTL a roguelike, it doesn't make it a good one.
Other than this major gripe with the game, the rest of gameplay is very repetitive - but also very enjoyable on its own. The brief texts are nice when you start but you'll find yourself ignoring them and just looking at the outcomes pretty soon since they're only for flavor and not really interesting. 90% of the prompts boil down to a "risk your resources for a possible reward" or "play safe and move on". Since you'll be given a prompt following this formula most of the times you take a step in the game, it gets old fast. Each of these having more options; more randomized (or even better, skill-based) outcomes or even them being less common would have done the game a service.
As with these events, most of the gameplay is easy to figure out. Exploring a system boils down to "try to move through it as fast as possible because you're low in resources" or "since you're high on resources use them to explore". The larger exploration is also the same: "do I have enough resources to take a high-risk, high-reward sector next or should I stick to a friendly one since I'm low"? Can you see the pattern here? Most of the decisions in the game (except during combat) are binary and revolving only around how many resources you have to waste (or, conversely, to protect in order to stay alive).
As with the event RNG, exploration is also dictated by randomness and not player strategy: you can get lucky and get a map with plenty of friendly sectors or one almost fully made of perilous, sensor-interfering, plasma-bombing nebulas which even the best player will be hard pressed to survive early on.
The combat is amazing and it's a perfect blend of the best type of roguelike strategy, top-notch simulation and space opera that owes nothing to Star Trek and the like. I think the combat being so engaging is why so many people disregard the flaws of this game and look only at its good parts.
If you like space operas, simulation and strategy, this could be the game for you. If you don't think that buying something where the random generation plays a more important part in the game than you do, better stay way though.
I would describe the game as one where your decision-making is what determines your success, it's not mechanically demanding. There is a lot of room for customizing your strategy, in the way you equip your ship, which crew members you have on it and how you decide to deal with hostile ships. You have to adapt to what you find at times and do the best with what's available. Eventually you may find a trader who has what's needed, so you can buy and sell some things in order to make things come together into your desired strategy.
My advice is to start the game with little to no knowledge about it, just learn as you go. I have a lot of fun developing effective strategies through trial and error and sometimes through pure chance, by using what I find.
A relaxing game with high replay value, highly recommended if you enjoy these types of games :]
It's a nice little spaceship sim. I like directing the crew about and it's very challenging to actually win. Mostly, it's a lot of dying and restarting, but each time is fun... for a while. After a couple dozen play throughs, the game does get pretty repetitive. So 4 stars for the game overall. Well worth the money, but a little more variety in the encounters would be a welcome addition.