Void War

It's a good game and addicting. My gripe is that there are a lot of frustrating moments you can't do much about and a couple insane difficulty spikes that are only something you can recognize after trial and error. That wouldn't be so bad except a single run lasts hours. A lot of this could have been abated by some information up front. There's also a lot of events that can only occur favorably if you've upgraded your ship or have a specific keyword of crew which the game gives zero indication on until you've encountered those events by recognizing new prompts or outcomes in future playthroughs. Again, if the upgrade screen could tell you that upgrading sensors/engines can affect event choices, that would be massive. There feels like a lot of playstyles. Atm, I think boarding might be a little too powerful where I think its pretty mandatory since no matter what the enemy is, you can go in to specifically target what your ship is weakest against, bypassing all their ship defenses. I think that's a good thing, because it diversifies roles greatly, partially why the game is so addicting, its just if you have a lot of damage, you can do all the boarding stuff good so its one of the game's simpler systems. You can have absolute butchers, you can have a saboteur go in and out, you can vent/poison rooms to camp dudes who are immune to it in those spaces. The ship can aid any of those roles as well by stunning, slowing, poisoning, breaching, causing fires, etc. Plus there's equipment to make soldiers good at any of that. It is highly random with a lot of items so its about making the best out of what you have. Its very difficult to have a certain item in mind and get it. Sectors and shrines can make certain soldiers more likely for you to find from merchants so there's a little controlled luck there. Being able to mix your focus between psychics, boarding, guns, or modules to win keeps the game fresh for new playthroughs. The game is also all over the place in difficulty. So many playthroughs I've had that have been zero challenge at all up until I hit a wall and often lose in one go. So much so that half my modules don't even get used until that one fight. That spike in difficulty is not ok. It makes the game into a 3 hour trial and error. You have to grind just to get the opportunity to lose and often it might not even be your fault because you just didn't happen to encounter enough things to make a decent build. This wouldn't be so bad if it was easier to escape. Its a button I only consider maybe one in every 3 playthroughs but in those few circumstances I usually can't even use it anyway or if I do I'm basically dead in the next node anyway. Leaving fights isn't really something you do since all the reward is at the end with some sprinkled chests in a fraction of encounters. You need everything you can get unless you got lucky and found a war sector, which for some reason is 2x-3x more lucrative than any other sector and it doesn't seem any harder other than a couple surprise 2nd fights I guess. It's rare to struggle in a non-elite encounter. You'll kinda just lean into a gimmick for 3/4 of the game and build up contingencies because there are some really hard counters in this game so again, it's the knowledge to know when you might encounter them and how to fight them. The game has you cross space to different nodes. But often you don't have any information on the node so it becomes guesswork. Sometimes it happens to be a peaceful node. Do this a few times and you'll suddenly feel very behind. As opposed to playthroughs where you can resolve nodes peacefully with more rewards than if you ever fought. The narration doesn't give any indication as to whether it wants you to fight for the big reward or if the game just wants to reward the temperament of the character. It's really not even about context clues, it's all a guess until you've encountered the events enough. Same with the nodes, you get very little information about any of them. Overall, the game doesn't value skill as much as luck and for that, I think its a good buy only if you're really into FTL or the 40k universe. I do very much like this game, it's just not friendly to a new player and I think rewards memorization too much.