Shortest Trip To Earth

[Ross Scott]

Genre: Strategy

Year released: 2019

Ross's rating: Unrated

Link to game:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/812040/Shortest_Trip_to_Earth/

Free to play: No

GaaS: Unknown

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[LiquidShadow]

This one definitely feels like just another FTL copy just by looking at it, but it's certainly something else.

 

They tried to give the player more control over how they build the spaceship. (in FTL, rng is a big part of the game)
I think it was a great idea, as this way, you cannot blame the game for being bad, most of the mistakes are on your part.

 

They have a unique feature over FTL too, and that is, combat inside the spaceship. Enemies will usually try to board your ship and kill you that way.

Because of this, crew management needs a lot of action, and it doesn't help that you can have a lot of crew, and some ships can be hard to navigate around.

 

The space exploration part is not the best part of the game, but quite okay nonetheless.

 

Ship to ship combat has some nice twist to it, as you can fully customize your weaponry, thus you can approach the fights in your own way.

 

However, the ability to freely build your ship's weaponry is the biggest downfall of the game too.

Once you figure out a working strategy, every run becomes the same.

For me, once I realized that while energy weapons have lower dmg compared to other types, them not using ammunition (which is a resource you'd constantly buy on space stations otherwise) is so much more cost efficient, I just started deconstructing every turret, and rebuilding them as energy weapons.

 

Now, yes, there are different ship types with differing amount of weapon slots, rocket tubes and other building spots.

And the aforementioned energy weapon build might not work on smaller ships since the space limitations.

But the problem is, almost every new ship you unlock, is larger than the previous, so I started forgetting about space management, and went to cost efficiency quite quickly.

 

General encounters are, well,, quite general, you get a few choices, if you pick the right one, you get loot, maybe rng is involved a bit.

 

The last thing this game has is metaprogression. You can unlock starting buffs, that you can spend points on for every run. (I forgot how those points work, but you get them for achievements, or something like that)

These buffs can be something so simple as just a few resources or a new crew member, but there are some that take away stuff from you, in exchange for something big.

 

All in all, I think it's a great game for the 30 hours or so, but after you have unlocked enough ships and buffs, the game just becomes boring. Unless of course, you start hunting for achievements, as there are quite a lot of them on steam.

 

(This review does not contain information about the DLC, and it might be a bit out of date, since I played the game mostly after launch, and haven't touched it since, but a quick look at the update notes don't suggest any drastic changes.)

[human]

so got into this game recently and it is a very strange FTL like game, not fully a rip of more like strife compared to doom.

 

there more story and lore compared to FTL if you care about that. 

also if you want a more ship building and changing, you can make more weapon spots more utility slots etc, but this makes a problem were ships with more slots seem better and your right, any ship with more slots are just better there no contents in this game bigger the ship the better. 

and the hull system is odd were (if your not playing on the hardest skill) you will loss hull permanently after it goes to zero I can't make heads or tails of this is bad or not, like on one hand you don't imminently die to getting some back to back fights, but if you get into a very bad spot and don't die you kind of have under half of your ships hull gone forever. 

 

and than there the weapons and there interesting ideas, were you use a very common and easy to get ammo to use them, but they use all the same ammo group so you will at some point run out and not be able to fight other ships or if the player uses energy weapons were the ship can just deflect the damage and shields just stop them dead in there tracks of not sporting the weapons to help are very bad, but they have unlimited ammo so it just better if the player use them only. 

 

this makes ships like the rouge rat trash over tiger fish, easy tiger rat has no good back up weapons if they player runs out of ammo, the other 2 have weapons that work alone with out ammo at the START of the game. 

 

than the big gimmick of the game over FTL start fate points, they are given from doing stuff like killing ships, exploring planets.

they give you these point to use at the start of the next game and you need to use all of the points other wise you loss them.

so you get massive amounts crew and extra stuff like weapons and other perks that have lots of extra metals and food etc,  so you end up with tons of stuff that seem to make need extra crew if you don't than you seem to not have the crew needed to do anything or if you get the random diy weapons seem to just not be helpful and a waste of points. 

 

so over all it is something that people who love FTL but want it to be more complicated and have more consistences for not playing well you will love this