FTL: Faster Than Light is a great space-themed roguelike. The core mechanics are pretty great even adapted for the iPad. From moving around the galaxy to fighting enemy vessels, there is much to do and many tries need to be taken in order to get to the end, more so to defeat the last boss
The game can get frustrating at times, it’s true. Sometimes certain events will give you one result when you do one thing, other times they will give completely different results from the same actions, and that’s a bit annoying. It’s hard to make decisions when they’re mostly random. Saving civilians from pirates one time gave me a reward, the other just had me waste time and energy in that fight, there are more extreme examples too, like warping at a random place, sometimes you’ll get a new weapon and some resources, sometimes you’re going to get boarded by three or four enemies, and if you just started, it’s game over quite quickly. Maybe a way to predict what you’re going to find in different places?
The battle system is pretty good, your ship and the enemy’s have shields that regenerate quickly, and you have your hull that is harder to fix. Missiles ignore shields while beam do not, you can fire ion weapons to disable systems, use drones to attack or defend your ship, some guns shoot junk randomly, some are beams you have to trace paths for, you can board the enemy vessel, you can mind control their crew and vice-versa. Sometimes you’ll get into fights where you just can’t win, for instance if you just have beams and the enemy got way too many shields, but in that case you can just warp away. Some enemy types are harder than others, it’s all about what kind of ship you have and what systems you have equipped.
You move your characters around to assign them jobs on your ship and they become better at them the longer they work these stations. More attack speed for weapons, shield recharge rate, dodge chance, etc. I kinda wish you could assign more than one guy for these rooms, if your crew gets a big enough size, you’ll have to put people on doors and cameras, and they don’t get anything from doing these jobs. You assign energy from your reactor to all your systems and it’s not pointless to upgrade doors and cameras when you can afford it. Stronger doors are useful against invading enemies and it’s always fun to kill an invading force by opening doors and exposing them to the vacuum of space. All of these things are well explained. You upgrade all of your systems so they can take more energy - and do more things - and the way you upgrade is up to you, there’s much replayability.
This iPad version of FTL is pretty good. As any roguelike you’re bound to die and need to restart multiple times before you get the hang of it, but it’s fun to play, so it doesn’t become a chore. There are plenty of unlockables - ships and layouts for them - to keep you playing and trying to accomplish weird challenges here and there. FTL is one of these games that keeps on giving.
