Shortest Trip to Earth - The Old Enemies

Positive: New content is always welcome - it is what it claims, a little more variety added to the normal gameplay of STTE. The new modules are neat. Neutral: I have noticed that rewards from defeating DLC enemies are noticeably greater than vanilla game rewards, which is nice but also a little strange in terms of balance. Negative: In my opinion, the humor in the writing of the new enemy factions is a little hamfisted in comparison with the narrative of the vanilla game. The Rats were a good enough representation of greedy materialism, I don't think the Capitaalo fill any real aesthetic gap.

I've probably flipped this DLC on and off four times now in between runs. I really want to enjoy this expansion, but it's pretty difficult to do so at times. The Early Game: Most of my problems with this DLC start and end here from a mechanics perspective; the first two sectors. The Caapitalo and Phobians seem to reward a disproportionate amount of resources compared to other enemies in these sectors while... Being annoying. They're armed will a lot of multi-hitpoint small size kinetics, and are individually unthreatening. However, they do one point of damage here, one point there that is completely unavoidable and non-counterable. On higher difficulties, this leads to a lot of permanent module damage that is completely outside the player's ability to influence due to a lack of crew skill necessary for targeting specific modules on small ships. Which is especially frustrating as they are portrayed to be a less advanced enemy than the Rat Empire yet are at the same time more difficult to deal with. The Phobians suffer from a similar issue with their ceramic cannons, doing low amounts of annoying chip damage with their numbers while rewarding high figures. Now onto the bigger problem for me personally between the two, aesthetic. The new factions... in my personal opinion, they don't introduce anything *new* to the sandbox. They tend to portray the same ideological teachings as the already present factions, but dumbed down it almost feels like. The interactions with the new factions feel linear and stale in comparison to others such as the Insectoids. I don't particularly dislike the politics involved, I actually think it's well done for the Rat Empire and Insectoids in particular, but these new factions feel... hollow. Like they're just resource packs that you need to smack with a laser a few times to open. Perhaps what this needed was to be a second campaign aside from the basic one. Having these enemies exist as the primary antagonists to their own series of sectors may have served them better than being cheapened reskins of already present factions may have led to a better overall experience. With all that said, I'm giving this a negative review with hopes that future DLC is given the little more love and attention it needs, both from a balance and aesthetic perspective.

STE and its DLCs are all well worth it for anyone that enjoyed FTL or just wants another Roguelike. VERY CHALLENGING. 11/13/20 - I'm experiencing my first bugs ever after buying The Old Enemies DLC. I was offered a bribe of 3 weapons to let some pirate extortionists safely retreat, but nothing ever popped up. The same thing happened earlier when I tried to buy a weapon for 5 exotics. For whatever reason, the weapon purchases aren't going through.

It's a good addition of new content to the early stages of the game, IF you're looking for content only. If you're looking for balanced gameplay, good luck finding it before being turned into Swish cheese by these early stage enemy.

Excellent expansion to an already great game. I hope the developers add one last bit of content as the game's last hurrah.

Excellent DLC that makes Shortest Trip to Earth even better, a must buy.

funky new ship, did the devs watch babylon 5? anyways, good expansion but a little pricey.

Adds additional advances to an already awesome adventure

I got to give the dev more money. Sorta buggy though.