"Giant alien spiders are no joke." -- person making a bad life decision

An impressive starship roguelite, with intricate ship-to-ship combat, careful trade-offs, a good variety of random events and ship parts (especially with the free Advanced Edition expansion), and a lot of smart design. Being able to freely pause the real-time combat however you want is deeply appreciated, and lets you take your time with planning your tactics. I adore the music, which has a good blend of more ambient and more melodic pieces.

My only major critique is that the difficulty levels feel mis-labeled. What they call Easy / Normal / Hard, I think would be fairer to call Normal / Hard / Very Hard.

I will never beat this game, my brain is too small.




I HATE ZOLTANS!!, I HATE ZOLTANS!!, I HATE ZOLTANS!!, I HATE ZOLTANS!!, I HATE ZOLTANS!!, I HATE ZOLTANS!!, I HATE ZOLTANS!!, I HATE ZOLTANS!!

Sometimes it's great to just stop for a moment and float there. Not necessarily even to stop and catch your breath and repair after a tough battle, sometimes just to take in the scene and enjoy where you are.

Every piece of music is great and fits your situation pretty well, and there's a lot of music! Nice to have as you assemble a ship and crew worthy of your journey.

The only real problem is that it takes quite a while to unlock things, which is a bigger problem when you lose your save. Oh well...

FTL is a game I think I could play forever. I've played a lot of roguelike games, but nothing scratches that itch quite like FTL does. Every procedurally generated system, enemy ship, and reward feels like it could lead to a hundred different outcomes. And that feeling is not misplaced. FTL is built in such a way that no matter what path the player takes on their travels to the Federation capital, it is unlike any other playthrough. Every new run I find myself thinking what I want to do differently this time, whether I want to play with boarding crew or a missile guzzling warship. The weapons you find, the crew you enlist, the systems you upgrade all are all easy to understand and modular ways to improve your ship's chances of making it to the end of the game. But in combination, these upgrades always end up making your ship look unrecognizable by the end of its journey. You may start as a defensively oriented engi ship orbited by drones with a mantis member onboard to protect its frail crew mates. By the end that ship may become a boarding vessel, sending drones to kill the enemy's crew alongside a mantis to run after any stragglers running for the medbay. Not that they'd make it as your lockdown bomb coats the entrances shut. The point being, that FTL is a game in which the player has unlimited freedom with limited options. No matter what each run throws at the player, they can turn it into a viable strategy and create a run that won't ever be replicated.