i am avoiding buying any new videogames for awhile but will pick this up eventually most likely
also: like, there’s gonna be an expansion that should flesh things out like they did for FTL. i’d be surprised if there wasn’t. i can wait for it
soundtrack is rad tho
I got a free FTL from this, who doesn’t have an FTL
Literally came here to post this and then thought
Wait is this the worst thread to post this question in?
But uh anyone want an FTL
I love this game. It captures my imagination. I love throwing a giant bug into a mountain. I want grabs and throws in Titanfall now.
I also love Blackberry. I took two broken hand-me-down Pearls and made one functioning Pearl out of the parts I called the frankenberry.
I beat Easy yesterday, feeling more prepared for a normal run. There’s a pilot who has a shield at the start of every battle which can be really powerful in one situation specifically: the mech that freezes enemies AND itself actually WON’T freeze itself if it still has the shield. So I’m trying out that set of mechs next, on Normal. We’ll see how it goes.
I beat it on easy, but since then I have gotten to the final battle and lost maybe a dozen times. It’s not FTL’s final fight but it is a pretty big difficultly spike imo
Shield pilot is the best, yes, and also the best portrait (at least until I get the bug)
I managed to beat it with Zenith, the guys with the laser cannon and ramming-tank. I found them tougher to play than the starting mechs, but they’re fun! The laser is a very powerful and satisfying weapon, especially once you upgrade it to not hurt your other units.
I heard a rumor that there are secret unlockable pilots from FTL.
The final battle is even a bit of a stretch on easy. I got used to not having to make any sacrifices and suddenly I’m running low on power and my important unit is at 1 health. Still, it feels like an extension of the prior levels rather than a very annoying checklist of things that you have to do to succeed.
Yeah, I don’t think the boss in this game is unreasonable. It doesn’t break the game’s own rules, unlike the boss of FTL. It makes sense that the difficulty gets cranked up; it’s the last level, so losing grid power is meaningless unless you actually lose it all. It ends up changing how you have to prioritize, but you’re still playing the same game.
Maybe I’ll crank it up to hard and see if I find it a significant jump in difficulty there because I’ve won more last levels than I’ve lost. I find the balance really strange in this game, because it’s essentially a randomly generated puzzle game, but any given turn can vary wildly in difficulty. They don’t have an algorithm to detect how many unusual/unintuitive moves any board state will have (nor would such an algorithm be easy to program), so sometimes I just steamroll through levels, and sometimes there’s a particularly nasty arrangement a couple turns in a row, and I’m forced to lose a bunch of power. You can mitigate some risk by careful positioning, but some of it is just the luck of the draw.
At least on normal, I find it happens infrequently enough that I’m able to recover from it, but hard might tip it over the edge? It seems difficult to balance a game that’s as straightforward and almost purely abstract as this one.
I love that the only nu-X-Com inspired percentage RNG is in the positive direction — the dim hope and pleasant surprise of the successful grid resist roll that you weren’t really expecting to see (given that the odds always hover around 20%). That’s game design wisdom right there.
After maybe 7 or 8 unsuccessful runs, I beat this on normal with the Rusting Hulks. I started really liking that team once I unlocked the pilot who’s unaffected by smoke. The two-tile jump/smoke bomb the flying unit can do is incredibly useful - my MO for most fights was to smoke up as large an area around buildings as possible and herd enemies into it with the pushing unit and air strikes. I’m really excited to go back in and try some other teams!
I feel like a big turning point for me was getting comfortable with letting the mechs take hits for the sake of maintaining area control. It’s not the end of the run if one dies! And you might pick up an extra from a time pod anyway.
Also fuck the robots on the snow island.
Yeah, mech health is a renewable resource you may as well spend down for the sake of grid power or rep. Only the last, killing hit has a permanent cost (and if I already have an unpiloted mech anyway, then even that can be free).
Note that you also get another pilot at the end of the island if you perfectly meet every secondary objective. You can use them or sell them immediately for 2 rep.
I skip the ice world in 90% of runs because those robots are balls