FTL: Faster Than Light
A little burned out on Dark Souls, and with the sequel a week away from PC release, I recently picked up FTL: Faster Than Light. I'd heard about it, and it was cheap, so I figured I'd give it a try. What I got was a reasonably entertaining game that's not every intensive and gives examples of what I consider both good and bad difficulty.
The "good" difficulty is in learning how things work. There are several different sorts of ship systems to experiment with, and there's fun to be found in picking up something new and finding out it works far better than you thought it did. Mixing and matching to figure out what works well is a good thing.
The "bad" difficulty comes in two main forms here. One is the random element - often events come up with a decision and there's a chance of a good outcome and a chance of a bad outcome. Arguably, risk assessment is a learned skill in this game, but you can have a play-through ruined, even near the end, by a simple string of bad luck. The other difficulty element that I consider bad really only hits on your first run that gets to the final boss, but it's a doozy - the fact that there is a final boss. The game presents itself as "you're carrying important data and have to get through eight sectors to deliver it and save the Federation." Once you get to the eighth sector, however, it transforms to "oh, and there's this maximized boss ship you have to beat in combat, so I hope you haven't been relying on diplomacy/evasion to get here." On subsequent runs, you can plan for that, but the first time you get there, it can be quite a shock.
For $10, I'm probably getting my money's worth out of the game as entertainment, but it doesn't quite live up to the extreme levels of hype I'd heard about it on various gaming sites.
The "good" difficulty is in learning how things work. There are several different sorts of ship systems to experiment with, and there's fun to be found in picking up something new and finding out it works far better than you thought it did. Mixing and matching to figure out what works well is a good thing.
The "bad" difficulty comes in two main forms here. One is the random element - often events come up with a decision and there's a chance of a good outcome and a chance of a bad outcome. Arguably, risk assessment is a learned skill in this game, but you can have a play-through ruined, even near the end, by a simple string of bad luck. The other difficulty element that I consider bad really only hits on your first run that gets to the final boss, but it's a doozy - the fact that there is a final boss. The game presents itself as "you're carrying important data and have to get through eight sectors to deliver it and save the Federation." Once you get to the eighth sector, however, it transforms to "oh, and there's this maximized boss ship you have to beat in combat, so I hope you haven't been relying on diplomacy/evasion to get here." On subsequent runs, you can plan for that, but the first time you get there, it can be quite a shock.
For $10, I'm probably getting my money's worth out of the game as entertainment, but it doesn't quite live up to the extreme levels of hype I'd heard about it on various gaming sites.
I heard it described as a "Rogue-like in space". The idea of an end game baffles me. Either that or I was terrible at Rogue and never saw its end game <.<;
ReplyDeleteI've heard that term a lot too. Which has always been an awkward point for me, because I've not ever really been familiar with the term "Rogue-like" even though I played some early games that probably qualified. I assume it gets that classification by virtue of 1) being largely randomized and 2) permadeath. There's a set starting point (though you unlock a selection of ships which start with different equipment and crew) and a set end point (the boss ship in sector 8. Everything between is randomized. There's some branching between sectors, in that you might get a choice of two types. Within each sector, the systems are laid out pretty randomly (though with some constraints), and each one from the entry point to the exit may have a random event or not.
ReplyDelete