FTL: Faster Than Light

Played this back in 2013 when Angry Joe reviewed it, been coming back to it to play nonstop every now and then to this day whenever I get the urge to blow up enemy ships and use their scrap to get shiny new loadouts to blow up other ships with. It's a bit of a learning curve, as learning to time your shots to land in just the right way to take out the enemy shields -and- slam your beam into the enemy hull as it goes down massively improves your run just as much as knowing when to flee and what order to buy upgrades in. (hint: get 2 bars of shields first), and while bad or unlucky situations can be unavoidable, getting good enough to mitigate those damages and salvage a run despite horrible odds is an amazing feeling that feels much more achievable to me on the small scale that FTL runs on. It's not one I can guarantee all my friends would enjoy, but it's my absolute personal favourite

Excellent little game, my favourite roguelike of all time. No matter how much time passes I always come back to it. My only complaint with it is that the rng required for certain achievements and to unlock some of the ships is insane.

I first bought and tried FTL a whopping 10 years ago, got frustrated at the final boss and shoved it to the side for a very long time. However now that I'm much older and far more patient I finally gave the game another chance, and fell in love with it. This game invokes a certain feeling that games rarely get right about space. It's something beautiful, but also very vast and lonely, and the soundtrack perfectly captures that feeling the moment the game is launched. Sometimes I'll let the entire theme play before starting a new game, and during gameplay I'll simply stop playing for a few moments just to let the music sink in before moving on. Behind a pretty exterior this game is absolutely brutal, make no mistake. The goal in the game's development was to make it feel like a suicide mission, where all the odds are stacked against you. There are multiple things you need to learn to balance while playing - where to use your power levels, keeping your fuel supply ready, keeping your crew alive, keeping your ship in tact all the while focusing on how to take down an enemy ship and their current status as well. While this can be overwhelming at times, the game also allows any amount of pausing to assess and plan out moves. The sci-fi elements of the game here really make this game as well, there's all these different alien races that each have their own cultures and societies that view the ongoing war in different ways. During the game's random encounters so many different things could happen that the choices between diplomacy, deception or avoidance can all be viable options, strategizing is just as important here as it is during combat. So why did I originally shelve the game? I really struggled with the final boss and felt that runs were a bit too RNG reliant on whether you could beat the boss or not, and while this is partly true, it's the point of the game where it demands a mastery over the games mechanics - luck may help you reach the final boss, but pure skill is needed in order to overcome it. I earned my first victory, and every subsequent one felt just as rewarding as the last. FTL is simple in design yet complex in strategy, every playthrough I find myself in different situations running into different problems, constantly having to adapt and hope I manage to scrape on by to the next sector, else I have to start all over again. It's unforgiving, but rarely in a way that felt discouraging. I had to become a better gamer to overcome FTL.