Oh man, FTL is one of my favorite games ever. You can win without cloaking devices/boarding. There's a lot of neat things to the game.
i gotta say, my friend who is actually good at the game would probably ream me for that review
i think one of the weaknesses of FTL is that the feedback cycle is so slow- it was difficult for me to pick up which strategies were efficient in a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, I am an impatient beast.
at least in my experience, enemies rarely felt challenging until the final boss, at which point whatever strategy you were previously using is either good enough or gets steamrolled. and it takes a couple hours to get there each time
i gotta say that i pretty much only played with one of the default ships, and even then never really got too deeply into drone strategies. i could see that some of the other ships designs/starting crews could more easily support alternative strats, or if i learned the game systems i could depend on certain upgrades becoming available and being worthwhile (aka git gud).
in FTL's defense, I played it enough to get that far! every single game on this list had some joy to it- they're the top 63 out of 650, and the biggest gaps are between 62 and 61, 31 and 30, and... i wanna say 12 and 11
I understand what you are saying. The final boss can be exceptionally rough, but once you figure out a general strategy it isn't really any harder than the stuff leading up to it. The game takes a long to begin understanding but once you do it's pretty great. You are right, though, you really have to be patient and invest a lot of time into the game to get something out of it other than 'that's a neat idea'.
Anyway I'm loving this list and the writeups. Even if I may like the games a bit more, I still really appreciate the critiques. ---