'FTL' Devs Announce New Game, 'Into The Breach'

[Guest]

It's a turn-based strategy game with awesome pixel art, grid-based combat, and procedural elements. What else needs to be said?

'FTL' Devs Announce New Game, 'Into The Breach' : Read more

 

[cryoburner]

FTL was available on PC before heading to iOS--where it's actually been more favorably received, according to MetaCritic--so it will be interesting to see if Into the Breach also heads to mobile.

What is that actually intended to mean? That the iOS version has a slightly higher Metascore? It also has only 17 critic reviews on that platform, compared to 41 on the PC, and only 6 of those reviewed the game on both platforms. The rest are mainly from reviewers more accustomed to writing about typical mobile shovelware, potentially skewing their scores. And if we look at user reviews there, the PC version actually has the higher score, and with far more reviews. Looking at the number of user reviews at Metacritic, as well as on the iOS app store and Steam, I get the impression that the game may have sold around 10 times as well on the PC as it did on mobile. I do think that the new game will probably come to mobile platforms eventually though. The interface looks very much like it would transition well to touchscreens, so they likely designed the game with an eventual mobile port in mind.

FTL is a pretty good game, and I've gotten quite a bit of play out of unlocking all the different ship variants, though I did find it kind of disappointing in some ways. For a game about traveling across the galaxy, its story is pretty much nonexistent. It's never even mentioned why your ship needs to be the one to defeat the enemy battleship. All the little side encounters are also glossed over in a line or two of text. Likewise, your crew might as well be mindless robots, since aside from their race, they have no real defining characteristics to differentiate them, nor do they communicate with you in any way. The game is entirely about the battles, and upgrading your ship, and doesn't go much into other territory to flesh things out, which seems like something of a missed opportunity. It's still a rather good game in other ways though.

 

[therealduckofdeath]

@cryoburner, one simple answer is probably that the bar for what constitutes good game quality is substantially lower on a mobile platform. Who would have guessed? On PC it will have to compete with big studio games while mobile gaming mostly is clones of IAP tower strategy games and bubble-pewing tap fests.