Lately I've been playing with different games, and at some moment I may make one post about them. For the moment I want to talk about one in particular.
Some weeks ago I decided to get another indie game that I'd heard very good things about: Faster Than Light. It seems it was a kickstarter project, and lots of people really liked the idea and it became quite popular.
The basis of the game is rather simple: You have a spaceship with a crew and a certain equipment, and you need to escape a rebel fleet following you, contact your allies with important information and finally defeat the rebel mothership.
The thing that is rather refreshing for a videogame is that you do not pilot the spaceship, or aim its weapons. What you do is manage the tasks that the crew does, reassign power, select targets and weapons, and manage in general some basic aspects of the ship.
You start in a space location, in a randomly generated universe, and you need to navigate through several sectors. In each sector you need to jump between several locations, and in each locations you may have random encounters with other people and ships, you may have combats or you may shop and repair your ship.
Everything except the initial ship configuration is randomized. Even when you found the same event decsription twice, the outcome of the event may be different. Sometimes you have crew or equipment that gives better options in these random encounters, and sometimes you can get huge rewards or huge drawbacks.
Apart form that, you usually combat lots of ships, including rebels, pirates, slavers, automated droids and other aggressive species. You start with some weapons and some power, and by buying upgrades and equipment you need to add and distribute power to increase your ship capabilities, until you reach the final sector and fight the mothership.
The game is....well, hard. You cannot permanently save one point in time, if you continue playing after saving you will lose that save, and if you get killed, you need to start from the begginning. There are lots of options, and the wrong configuration can kill you pretty fast. After several games, you learn what works best, but still it's rather hard to get to the final sector. Once you're in the final sector, the Mothership, which requires 3 combats, one after the other, can quite easily destroy you in the first fight without you landing a shot, even when you were winning all previous combats.
Even while being a difficult game, and depending a lot on your luck given the randomness of the encounters, it's very easy to grasp the basics. It's also a game where a round till the last sector takes at max around 2 hours, which means that you can play 10 minutes, save, and continue later. This is a thing that I really appreciate, since you don't always have time to dedicate 1 hour to one game, and some games require that hour just to advance a little bit.
It kind of follows the idea of old games, where the difficulty was hard, and where if you got killed, that was it and you had to start again. It makes things more interesting after all, since each gameplay does not take very long anyway, and then you can just restart. Most modern games let you fail as many times as you need until you get the hang of it and pass that spot. This makes it easier to play, specially if you don't have much time to dedicate to it, but it also makes things much less interesting, since it's just a matter of reloading to the last 5 minutes, with no penalizations. FTL is much more severe in the penalization, and that makes you more involved during a playthrough.
Becasue of all these properties, the game is incredibly addictive. You always want to get further, to try some new configuration, some new weapon. While playing, some special events give you access to other ships, and in each ship you can also unlock a different basic configuration, so the replaying value is huge. Some ships may be a little overpowered if you know how to use them, but oh well...after being destroyed so many times, it's also good to have some ship that can rip to pieces most of the obstacles you'll find.
I have finished the game in easy, once. Let's just say the Mothersip is quite the big bastard. However, depending on your luck, it can also turn into a curbstomp battle...this single time I won, I had managed to grab 3 burst laser 2 plus one ion bomb. The end result was that I did not even have to repair the ship between battles, and the first 2 of them were done really really fast. Then again, it was mostly luck to find a shop that sold that weapon, since the items in the shop are rather random too.
Summing it up, this is a really addictive game, really good while keeping things simple and fast, and really hard. I highly recommend it, and since the prices is quite low, I'd say to buy it, since you're supporting this style of game that tries to innovate in original ways.
Some weeks ago I decided to get another indie game that I'd heard very good things about: Faster Than Light. It seems it was a kickstarter project, and lots of people really liked the idea and it became quite popular.
The basis of the game is rather simple: You have a spaceship with a crew and a certain equipment, and you need to escape a rebel fleet following you, contact your allies with important information and finally defeat the rebel mothership.
The thing that is rather refreshing for a videogame is that you do not pilot the spaceship, or aim its weapons. What you do is manage the tasks that the crew does, reassign power, select targets and weapons, and manage in general some basic aspects of the ship.
You start in a space location, in a randomly generated universe, and you need to navigate through several sectors. In each sector you need to jump between several locations, and in each locations you may have random encounters with other people and ships, you may have combats or you may shop and repair your ship.
Everything except the initial ship configuration is randomized. Even when you found the same event decsription twice, the outcome of the event may be different. Sometimes you have crew or equipment that gives better options in these random encounters, and sometimes you can get huge rewards or huge drawbacks.
Apart form that, you usually combat lots of ships, including rebels, pirates, slavers, automated droids and other aggressive species. You start with some weapons and some power, and by buying upgrades and equipment you need to add and distribute power to increase your ship capabilities, until you reach the final sector and fight the mothership.
The game is....well, hard. You cannot permanently save one point in time, if you continue playing after saving you will lose that save, and if you get killed, you need to start from the begginning. There are lots of options, and the wrong configuration can kill you pretty fast. After several games, you learn what works best, but still it's rather hard to get to the final sector. Once you're in the final sector, the Mothership, which requires 3 combats, one after the other, can quite easily destroy you in the first fight without you landing a shot, even when you were winning all previous combats.
Even while being a difficult game, and depending a lot on your luck given the randomness of the encounters, it's very easy to grasp the basics. It's also a game where a round till the last sector takes at max around 2 hours, which means that you can play 10 minutes, save, and continue later. This is a thing that I really appreciate, since you don't always have time to dedicate 1 hour to one game, and some games require that hour just to advance a little bit.
It kind of follows the idea of old games, where the difficulty was hard, and where if you got killed, that was it and you had to start again. It makes things more interesting after all, since each gameplay does not take very long anyway, and then you can just restart. Most modern games let you fail as many times as you need until you get the hang of it and pass that spot. This makes it easier to play, specially if you don't have much time to dedicate to it, but it also makes things much less interesting, since it's just a matter of reloading to the last 5 minutes, with no penalizations. FTL is much more severe in the penalization, and that makes you more involved during a playthrough.
Becasue of all these properties, the game is incredibly addictive. You always want to get further, to try some new configuration, some new weapon. While playing, some special events give you access to other ships, and in each ship you can also unlock a different basic configuration, so the replaying value is huge. Some ships may be a little overpowered if you know how to use them, but oh well...after being destroyed so many times, it's also good to have some ship that can rip to pieces most of the obstacles you'll find.
I have finished the game in easy, once. Let's just say the Mothersip is quite the big bastard. However, depending on your luck, it can also turn into a curbstomp battle...this single time I won, I had managed to grab 3 burst laser 2 plus one ion bomb. The end result was that I did not even have to repair the ship between battles, and the first 2 of them were done really really fast. Then again, it was mostly luck to find a shop that sold that weapon, since the items in the shop are rather random too.
Summing it up, this is a really addictive game, really good while keeping things simple and fast, and really hard. I highly recommend it, and since the prices is quite low, I'd say to buy it, since you're supporting this style of game that tries to innovate in original ways.
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