The Art of Jawacide: Week I: Madjawa vs the Death Star

Roguelikes: What are they? How did they come to be? Why can't I save? Why the hell does every single missile hit when I have 55% evasion? Welcome to the first weekly gaming segment on the Sandcrawler: The Art of Jawacide Where I'll be discussing and reviewing roguelike games. 

So what exactly is a roguelike? Wikipedia defines it as

"a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by procedural level generation, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics and permanent death, and typically based on a high fantasy narrative setting."

While there are plenty of classic roguelikes that fall squarely into these parameters, modern roguelikes tend to stray from high fantasy narrative and turn-based combat for the most part, leading to some very interesting games. Over the next several weeks I'm going to review//write about some of the more popular roguelikes out there, as well as some less popular roguelikes worth looking into. So without further ado, let's talk about one of the most popular roguelikes on the market today: FTL!

ーFaster Than Light ー

(alternatively: F**k These Lasers, For the Loss)

Oh FTL, where do I even begin with you? You sick, twisted, time-suck of a game. The general premise of FTL is as follows: You're a spaceship carrying vital Federation intel, and there's a whole herd of pissed rebels who will stop at nothing until you and the information you carry are deader than the Ishumura from Dead Space. Your goal is to bravely flee the oncoming fleet to relay this valuable by hopping from star node to star node, whilst dodging pirates, astroids, rebels, giant alien spiders (they're no joke, you know.) and a whole plethora of other zesty ways to meet your untimely demise, which you will. Again and again and again.

 

A very familiar screen.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love FTL to pieces. It's a brilliant blend of semi-turned based space combat, complete with all kinds of shenanigans such as winning by suffocating the other crew to death, or forcing them to kill each other with mind control, but make no mistakes: This is a hard game. Generally speaking, I am all for hard games, they're a nice change of pace to the copious amounts of modern games that like to hold the player's hands a bit too much.

Classic.

 That being said, there's the sort of hard that tests your skills, and there's the sort of hard that tests your luck. My one major complaint with FTL is that, unfortunately, it falls into the second category. While knowing what you're doing is certainly a huge boon in FTL, there are plenty of times where you honestly don't stand a chance. I don't think I've played another game where, despite having an entirely upgraded ship with the best weapons in game, I still managed to get obliterated... On Easy.

That all being said, FTL is still one of my favorite roguelikes out there, with piles of various ships to unlock, the huge Advanced Edition update, and just enough randomness to stay interesting, I highly recommend it. 8/10, would suicide bomb the Death Star again. 


 Stay tuned next week when we dive into a more obscure roguelike!

-Madjawa