You will most likely die over and over and over until you get the hang of it and even then well....
Excelent game, a great deal of fun, with neat elements. Amazing music and great pixel art. A must buy indeed.
This game cost me <9 eur.
Yesterday going out cost me 50 eur.
Ftl game fun factor 10 of 10, hours spent in last 3 days ~ 20.
Going out fun factor 4 of 10, hours spent in last 3 day ~ 4.
So for a 5 times less money, I got 5 times more enjoyment with a much better fun factor !!!
Oh yes.... after playing this game you will start to appreciate a lot more what being a good captain means.
And why are you reading this? instead of playing the game.... if you spent time reading all this comments, you spent probably 1 hour.... for what.... deciding to by a game? If you are over 30 and you are living in a Europe or USA .... your hour should worth more than 10 eur.... and you just wasted 1 hour .... in reading about the game instead of playing it (and having fun).
Game of the year for me - it has it all. A fantastic soundtrack, excellent core mechanics, personalisation, charm, addictive gameplay, decisions that matter, a serious challenge and huge replayability.
FTL is probably one of the simplest game ever. Basically you have three game screens: the ship screen, the improvements screen, and the jump/galaxy screen. That's it. But believe me, that's all you need to play for hours and hours and hours. The basic idea is brilliant, and the gameplay is very addictive ("just one more jump", "just one more battle", "just one more improvement" :-)).
There are a few things though - be prepared: the "easy" setting is actually rather normal or even hard, while "normal" is very hard. Also, the final cluster always VERY tough as you have to defeat the rebel mothership more than once (and it is a big thing to defeat it once! to defeat it three times is a very serious challange). Also watch out for the random events - a lot depends on chance/luck so even if you follow the same route and improvements route, no two play through will ever be the same. A definite must-have game. 5 stars. (And a very good news for laptop players: it runs even on old Intel GMA4500M chipset laptops)