This is a great roguelike, but not a fun game by any stretch. You win or lose by the flip of a coin you have no control over - you might run into a (literally) unbeatable enemy, you may or may not find the upgrades you need, etc. It is incredibly unfair and this is exactly what they were trying for - it's a great gambling sim and addictive as heck because of that. The music's nice and the graphics are decent. Once you get past the (again, intentional) unfairness, the biggest problem is that almost all combat is a tedious "click same keys over and over" thing. However, if you get boarded - and you will, a LOT if the coin flips go against you - it turns into intensive micromanagement with a UI that is not very responsive - not fun.… Expand

I want to like this game, I really, really do. But it's so frustrating that I'm not willing to take any more time to play it.

Yes, it's a rogue like- and yes, rogue likes- are heavily dependent on randomness but FTL takes it to the extreme. I lost and lost and lost (and losing sees a restart from scratch - only the hardcore need apply); it's not even that there isn't a component of skill. One does need to be skilled: managing your crew, sub-systems and power takes a lot of effort whilst also pinpointing attacks on the enemy.

But chance and the increasing difficulty curve as you venture further across the universe outweigh the skill component solidly.

Rather save money, get a dice, roll it till a six; then declare yourself a winner. It'll be far less aggravating all 'round.… Expand

Beware the Rogue fanboys. This is a randomly generated rogue-ish statgrind with no saving your game (except upon "save & exit"), randomly generated encounters and therefore random overall difficulty, and permanent death. The game is entirely randomly generated ship-vs-ship combat and the combat itself is slow, generic, and tedious. This is the kind of game you can easily waste hours on, though only because of the carrot-stick statgrind aspect where you fight just one more battle to get just one more point so you can buy just one more upgrade, but not because the gameplay itself is actually fun... unless you consider statgrinding inherently fun. Statgrinding is basically the entire game. And dying in impossible encounters. Can't forget the classic dying in impossible encounters.… Collapse

The people writing the high reviews have played the game for maximum of 2-3 hours. FTL seems fun when you first start out, but as you repeat the game over and over and over and over and over and over again you realize the entire game is rubbish because your chances of winning a particular run are controlled very minimally by you. All you do is steer the ship and click on parts of enemy ships. I had a run where I had nothing but the starter guns all the way up to the 7th sector, I explored many beacons and found nothing. The game is rogue like but fails to provide even a reasonably fair amount of random chance. Other times the game will reward you with something amazing that you can't use at the most inopportune time - one run I was given what was claimed by the game to be an amazing laser - but I had no means at all to operate this gun on my ship as I found it in the 1st sector. On another run I did great, but could not find a weapon like that laser to save my life - and was shafted by random chance. This SOUNDS like it could be fun sometimes, but after you play the game over and over you get real sick of "oh look, no weapons, oh look no new crew members" and you end up eventually running out of fuel and scrap and dying helplessly or you somehow get far then are ill-equipped for the higher powered enemy ships and die extremely quickly. The game has terrible pacing and while the mechanics operate fine, some things like the AI leave a LOT to be desired. I don't know why people feel like they must love indie games no matter how good or bad they are - if you give them false praise you're only hurting them. The game could be improved with patching, but somehow I sincerely doubt the odds the game will ever see an update - the developers got our money and have so far shown no real interest in doing much else with the game based on statements they've publicly made. For a half-working title like this I would not pay the price it's going for, $10 is too steep for a broken indie game and as gamers we should demand better quality from indie studios if we ever want them to replace corporate studios that just create more franchise games.… Expand

The single biggest factor in this game is luck. As every encounter is completely random it removes any real sort of skill or challenge from the game, or a sense of achievement to more accurate. When you do 'finish' it you realise it wasn't because you did anything in particular, but because you happened upon the right encounters. The gameplay is fun, but the sheer amount of luck in the game completely detracts from it… Expand

A glorified waste of time which punishes any poor sap the longer he sticks around. Poorly designed, with all the addictiveness of a flash game. Steer well clear, you'll be glad you did.

This game has so much potential it could be a ton of fun, but most games are ruined by simple bad luck. In order to win you MUST get the right weapon upgrades or you are doomed, but getting them is a matter of pure luck.

This could be resolved by re-balancing the sectors and allowing people to explore more, or making weapon drops more common. Until this is fixed I would avoid the game unless you want to lose or win based on pure luck.… Expand

Game is really fun when it works, but random crashes to desktop destroy this game as it is now. There is no ability to save, so when you crash to the desktop (random), then you've lost your game and need to restart. This has happened to me now two games in a row and I'm giving up. The ability to save games, or at least auto-save after every jump so you can resume after a crash would at least make this game playable while they work out the bugs.… Expand

I know it is a roguelike, but even on those terms it is completely and impossibly stupid. This is not Dark Souls or Ninja Gaiden, where the difficulty comes from the intense challenge to learn how to play the game right. Here the difficulty comes from the programmers laughing at you while they slap unfair situations in your face. Almost every situation is decided by pure luck, especially when you have learned to multi-task. Avoid this game at all costs, it is frustrating and pointless since the good premise and slick production conceals a game that is not fun, entertaining, rewarding or actually challenging (having good luck is not a challenge) in any way.… Expand

People have far too romantic a view of games depending on the source, or having been an early supporter of the game pre-release are unwilling to look at it with a truly critical eye. As a marketing exercise it's been fantastically successful, but as a game it fails miserably. It is no better than a slot machine. Yes, there is some strategy and tactics involved that improve your odds, but they're so outweighed by random circumstance as to be virtually pointless, it's like buying two lottery tickets instead of one. It needs to be fixed and that won't happen as long as people are willing to put a smiley face on any old rubbish.… Expand

There is a big difference between hard and unfair, this game is unfair and not hard because the outcome of the decisions you take ,your rewards and enemies are random. It doesnt take any skill to beat the game is just having a lot of luck, every time you die because of bad luck you will have to start all over again so the game becomes boring very fast. Pirate the game,play it on normal and if you like it buy it, that way you will understand what all the negative ratings mean when they say this game purely about luck.… Expand

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Well, at first I was lured into this game and I enjoyed it. But after 3 weeks of games I found that it's a game based mostly on LUCK, not on skill. I made it to the last boss 9 times. All lost because I didn't have enough firepower, enough shields or enemy shots hit me all in the right rooms while mine missed 3-4 times in a row. Well, I suggest you of restarting game each time you reach 4-5 zone and you don't have the right equipment. Another font of disappointment is the random encounters. Some are matched to your strenght. Others are IMPOSSIBLE to kill. At least 4 times in a row I found 3 enemy ships with 4 (FOUR) shields. After third my missiles were gone, so the fourth killed me without any hope. Well, It's a nice game, but sometimes it seem only a loss of time.… Expand

I'm going to copy-paste my Super Meat Boy review here, enjoy.

hipster trash you guys are just encouraging these crap games to being developed, these devs are rolling in money laughing at you because of how rich you made them - off a fukin 2d simple game. get real hipsters, you have no taste, and should stick to your "retro" systems

To give a short description, this game feels like Candyland IN SPAAAACE! Fundamentally, this game feels like it was only half-built, and all the parts that should have been actual gameplay that made the game fun were replaced with completely arbitrary dice rolls. Games are short to the point of feeling abrupt and unfulfilling when you complete them, but the reason why is obvious: Once you have any halfway-decent equipment, all challenge to the game is over. Basically, the game is won or lost in the first sector, and you'll be restarting the game 10 times for every 1 time you get past the second sector. It's a game you don't so much play as have happen to you. You can screw up the game, definitely, but you can't win it through any of your own power you just have to keep restarting until the game lets you get lucky and suddenly be handed powerful weapons that let you beat the game easily, and from then on, it's just a matter of not screwing up what you have. I just wish there were more actual GAME in this game to play.… Expand

In this game, you click rooms on your ship, watch timers move, and do little else. There are some reading sections, but as far as gameplay, it's a bland, uninventive game. It is extremely over-rated.

I have looked at the screenshots on Steam and I have to say the game looks absolutely TERRIBLE!!! Your basically just watching over a spaceship and controlling what people do! The graphics look horrific as well, it's just a **** 2d model of a spaceship!! What the developers of this game didn't realize is that people like to BE INSIDE of the spaceship and DO MISSIONS like in mass effect 2!

Although I haven't played this **** game, it would be safe to say even for me that this is one of the worst games ever.… Expand

FUN GAME RUINED BY RANDOMNESS


Okay if you like games of skill and being able to not die to sheer randomness then avoid this game. It starts off fun enough, the graphics are functional enough and easy to see what is going on, the sound is decent enough too. A brief summary of the game's plot is you're a ship from the Federation outrunning the evil Rebels and you must reach a set stage and confront and kill the Rebel's flagship. It has a nice sci-fi space opera feel to it but where it goes wrong, very wrong is that more or less your chance of success or failure is based on pure luck and even then when you get the Rebel's ship on it's last legs it's clear the programmers are messing with you as it suddenly fires off a load of lasers. The only way to win is pretty much get a right combination of weapons and ship upgrades that are very much luck dependent, not on your skill as a player. This sours the overall experience and yes so what if they claim it to be rogue like but really if all you want to do is die to the end boss again and again and the other stages seems pretty much repetitive after a while. At first I thought the game was fun but it became very clear it's just designed to kill you off and then becomes just repetitive. Nice ideas, sloppy end game, once beaten no real inclination to go back and play it again. Some hope for the games redemption is with mods but as the games stands on it's own merits, it is far too random to be fun.… Expand

It is fun to explore in this space adventure, but your success is mostly random. Unlocking new ships is mostly an exercise of hoping for 3 random events to happen in succession or you finally get that one good run where your ship stays more advanced than your enemies. Then, when you beat the boss and get an advanced ship that is 10% better, then enemies get 25% harder making a negative progression. At first, the main game is hard to the point of frustration, but not too hard to discourage you. Spending a half hour running around in space only to have some elite ship come out of nowhere and kill you in 3 volleys of shots is infuriating. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could spend your “score” on permanent upgrades or be able to customize your ships with the load out you want. Score is meaningful in a skill based game but has no place here other than a consolation price when the difficulty doubles for a particular battle. If you are like me, you’ll stick with it to beat the boss by which time you’ll have seen 90% of all mission content. I thought that I’d finally have a 4/10 chance at having a good run rather than a 2/10 chance after unlocking the ship you get for killing the boss. But now, the chances seem to go down to 1/10. And then, you’d just be killing the boss again unless you are lucky enough to unlock some other ship. I suppose that’s why they made it harder (lack of a second quest). My time is valuable and I expect at least something to improve if I pour my time into it. You’ll learn what missions have a higher success rate and can make better decisions, but mostly failed missions gain you nothing. Overall you’ll feel mostly frustrated, a little helpless, and then have a few moments of triumph.… Expand

After getting swarmed by all the hype of this game and playing it for myself, I can only call this title a mediocre experience and that's saying a lot considering how much I usually like these kind of games but at the end of the day, it had the same disappointing qualities as the latest XCOM minus the save-abuse which is replaced by mandatory "hardcore" mode frustrations instead where if you die, you die permanently and same goes if any of your crew also die. You begin by being thrown into a stringed-together series of space locations consisting of small "dots" as "locations" where random sh!t will happen, be it getting raped by some random enemy ship or just driving into some scrap (currency). And that's it. This is all that the game expands upon. A randomized stringed-together pile of event that gradually just gets harder and harder until you fail while having you abide by a timer (Invading rebel fleet "chasing" you). Looking at it now in retrospect, I guess a more fitting description for this game would be Tetris. But in space. So is it a good game? It's mediocre. Why? Because it's good enough to kill time, even if the fashion of killing this time is not very desirable which strives quite a stretch from what a GAME is supposed to be. FUN.… Expand

The most painful aspect of this game is that there is evidence of a game hidden deep inside FTL that I really want to play. The dominant part of the gaming mechanic interferes with my ability to play the game I want to play. There are numerous random elements which have overwhelmingly powerful consequences. This is not a game you can complete with sheer determination. It seems that the developer mourns the absence of games that make us lose more frequently. Desperately wanting to play the game which I saw with my mind's eye, I applied cheats and save game editors. No matter what I tried, I was not able to find a way to have fun playing this game, hence my score. Still, if you can get a free demo, I would encourage you to try it. Evidence suggests some people enjoy this kind of gameplay.… Expand

FTL is addictive alright, but for me that lasted about 10 hours. Even on "easy" mode, the game becomes exasperating quickly. With a little help from various tips on the web, I can get through five sectors before getting summarily clobbered by an enemy ship. Once I space-jumped into two consecutive suns (which shut down some systems and start fires) and got destroyed by the enemy (which seemed less affected). One time my oxygen room got hit by enemy fire and I couldn't repair it for some unknown reason, so all my crew died and the game ended. Every time I'm doing just fine, rolling along, then a ship more powerful than mine in some way shows up and crushes me. Easy mode should be easier than this; I should at least be able to get to the final (8th) sector before I get wasted. Also, the game offers no help or tips and you can't save it as you go. That's right, when your ship dies you have to start all over again. I, for one, have had enough.… Expand

This is easily the worst game I've played in recent memory. Imagine fetch missions, a la WoW, set in the Space Quest universe, and lacking the tongue-in-cheek humor of that universe. This game tries to appeal to our nostalgia, but it fails on a visceral and basic level. Should you choose to waste your money, take this very basic primer on "advanced" tactics: buy a second tier weapon ASAP, target weapons first, then shields--often this is enough. In case of boarders, move your little 8 pixel crew around into a secure room, pretend that one of the pixels is Mal, and vent your 2D Firefly class ship into space.

See? I summarized a "tactically challenging" and "textually deep" game in about 100 words, and saved you $10 to find that out. There is no challenge and no replay value. There are better games on Facebook, and you don't have to pay for them. Save your money.… Expand

The game starts off as fun, but once you peer past the curtain you quickly become annoyed/frustrated. Once you realize that every single action in the game is random, it quickly dawns on you that there's little point to playing the game. Its like solitaire, everything is pre-determined, you simply go through the actions and pray the RNG comes out in your favor. There's absolutely zero strategy involved, each turn you 'pull the level' and hope the slot machine rolls in your favor. Quite disappointing.… Expand

Faster Than Light is either a boring hardcore game or a casual game ruined by tremendous moments of frustration. The experience is sandwiched between a woefully inadequate starting ship that sends many straight to rage quit and a disproportionately difficult end boss. Everything in between is random, but generally simple and repetitive. The point is to keep unlocking new ships, but even that becomes tedious without a consistent map.… Expand

two words. BULL Ive tried to play this game. I really have. It just is not fun in the least for me. I guess I'm missing something because everyone seems to love it but I, for the life of me can not play it. First time i played it i had my oxygen supplie taken out and a boarding party come on my ship. my entire crew was killed either by the boarding party or the lack of oxygen. second time my oxygen was taken out again and it couldnt be fixed because everyone who tried to suffocated. thrid time everyone was killed again by a boarding party. I have tried probably 30 times to squeeze any incling of enjoyment out of this game but I simply cannot do it. 0/10… Expand