Every jump is just as likely to land you in a well-written miniature text adventure that often feature interesting moral choices. Sometimes that backfires, and I have to bite my nails as I desperately limp to the nearest repair shop, hoping there’s not a heavily armed pirate waiting to exploit my moment of weakness. While you never know exactly what’s waiting for you at each point, I’m always tempted to explore as much as I can and upgrade my ship as much as I can before I reach the extremely tough battle at the end. As you’re driven forward through the five-sector map of randomized navigation points by an unstoppable rising tide of Rebel ships, it forces still more decisions. As the most frequently accessed part of the UI, it’s almost always either covering up vital crew health information or constantly needing to be reopened to target new enemy systems. The one spot that could use some work on the iPad’s touch interface is the weapon panel. Do you target their shields first and make them more vulnerable to your next attack, or try to knock out their weapons with the first volley and spare yourself the repair bill of having to take some hits? Do you concentrate on raw firepower, or throw in some ion weaponry to quickly disable enemy systems, drones that can attack or defend, or send over boarding parties and use mind control to turn the enemy crew against each other? Or try to power up your FTL drive and run? Whatever you decide, no plan survives contact with the enemy, and FTL does a great job of throwing unexpected and unlikely attacks at you to force you to pause and reconsider. Success in battle involves timing your most powerful shots to hit when their shields are weakest, which effectively creates some great “Fire on my command!” moments. The many ways in which multiple versions of blasters, beams, flak, missiles, ion blasts, teleported bombs, attack drones, boarding parties with six distinctly different races, and mind control interact with shields, cloaking devices, defensive drones, engine speed, medical bays and cloning facilities, reinforced doors, and more is endlessly interesting. Play Combat seems rudimentary at first, since both 2D pixel-art ships sit still on the screen trading blows, but its wide variety of offensive and defensive options give it surprising legs. That’s the joy of it: you never get to feel safe. (That makes it an excellent fit for the iPad’s touch controls, too.) But because it involves so many random factors, from whether a missile hits its mark to if your crew can rescue a space station from giant spiders in a miniature text adventure, FTL is often cruel to the point where a few bad jumps can render a playthrough effectively unwinnable. After countless hours of the PC and iPad versions, I’ve effectively mastered its amazing ship-to-ship and somewhat weaker hand-to-hand combat systems – it doesn’t take too long, as it generously allow you to pause at any time and consider what to do and where to move your tiny crewmembers. And even though it doesn’t always work – or perhaps because it doesn’t always work, and sometimes everyone dies and you have to start again – it’s those moments when it does that make FTL: Advanced Edition one of the most memorable and replayable games I’ve ever played.FTL is a story generator more than it is a game of skill. Kirk or Han Solo would attempt to reverse his fortunes and save his crew. It’s the kind of desperate, so-crazy-it-just-might-work move James T. There’s something special about a game where you can choose to reroute power away from the vital life-support system to the weapons and coax one last shot out of your crippled, flaming wreck of a spaceship.
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