Great, except for the flagship
I'm going to post a somewhat dissenting review here.
FTL is a really cool concept: a spaceship management-themed rogue-like, where you have to dodge through space, fighting and/or avoiding enemy ships, running a gauntlet to reach a final objective. The game is quite open and free-form, allowing the player to choose between a range of different alien races, ships, upgrades and strategies to try to gain the upper hand over the enemy fleet, which is in hot pursuit.
That is, until you run in to the flagship (i.e. the end boss), which is ludicrously overpowered and dominating. It's not the difficulty that I dislike, per se (I'm fine with hard games), but more that it's so much more powerful than everything else you encounter in the game that it has (in my opinion) a very unbalancing influence.
The problem is that this design just doesn't work well with this type of game. The flagship has certain specific weakpoints at each stage, and so several possible ship builds are really effective against it. To defeat it, you need to have picked up certain items/weapons and to have built your craft in a particular way. However, once you know how powerful the flagship is, the player is forced to have to kit out their ship in a particular way to defeat it, which removes much of the development choice that the player is seemingly presented with at the start.
And this is the problem: once you know how brutally hard the flagship is, the nature of the entire game changes, from being this nice, freeform roguelike, to having to spend the entire game building and preparing *for the flagship*. The flagship essentially takes over and becomes 'the game', which in my opinion is just not good design.
Having such a powerful, fixed, static end boss fundamentally undermines the core nature of what otherwise would have been a very nice, freeform roguelike, because it takes over the game and ties the player's hands, restricting developmental freedom.
The flagship also blatantly cheats, in its design. For example, its first phase has four extremely powerful weapons that are isolated and inaccessible from the interior of the ship, which is obviously done to prevent certain boarding-based builds from working against it. It feels thoroughly cheap and cheesy - like the developers are deliberately hitting you below the belt, and they know it full well.
FTL is a really nice effort by a talented indie studio. Without the flagship, I would have given the game 5 stars. However, I can't help but feel the game seems overrated when the design of the flagship is so glaringly poor and undermines the rest of the game. It's frustrating, because the rest of the game is great, and it would have been so much better and more enjoyable if they had dropped the flagship and spread that difficulty spike more evenly across the rest of the game. By all means give the game a try, if you like the idea of a space-combat-themed rogue-like. But, be warned: for me, the flagship utterly ruined the game (I will never play it again without a mod to remove the flagship). It might ruin it for you too.
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