This game is really really good. When they announced it was a top down grid based strategy game, I was a little worried and curious about how removed it would feel from FTL, but there are so many similar aspects in both obvious and subtle ways. In a lot of ways it really does feel like a sequel, like they took elements from FTL and restructured them in a way that feels almost completely new, but not totally unfamiliar. Resource acquisition, progression from stage to stage, upgrades, equipment trade offs, crew skills - they're all here, and they're all similarly tied to one another the way they were in FTL, but it feels fresh.
There are a lot of little things that make the game less frustrating than FTL could occasionally be. For one quick example, each turn feels like a puzzle, and if/when you reach a turn where you can't mitigate each threat satisfactorily, you know it's a result of the actions you made in the preceding turns. Even just knowing that failure was preventable if you had thought it through a bit more is less frustrating than getting hit by an asteroid that destroys your o2 and the like.
