OMG WTF FTL FTW

When I first met the new Games Editor we both agreed that Felix needed reviews of proper mainstream games. Indie games are great fun and it’s fantastic how the games industry is moving in this direction. However, those triple-A £40 games are the bread and butter of most people’s collections and what most people end up playing. But then I played FTL and decided to disregard that entire conversation.

FTL: Faster Than Light is about as indie as it gets: made by a handful of people and funded through the currently very popular Kickstarter service. This game offers the closest experience you’ll ever get to starring in your very own sci-fi, space-faring movie. If you’re as nerdy as me (and this is Imperial so I reckon the people less nerdy than me are in a minority) then you’ll love it. On the game’s website this game is defined as ‘Roguelike’ and if you weren’t a gamer in the very early 80s you probably have no idea what this means. This genre, pioneered by the fantasy RPG Rogue, involves randomised dungeons, and the rather mean concept of ‘permadeath’; once you died in Rogue, everything your character achieved is lost forever. It fell out of fashion by the late 80s, although influences of this genre still remain. The Diablo series is famous for its randomised environments and the most recent instalment included the aptly named hardcore mode, bringing permadeath back into the mainstream.

FTL is essentially a roguelike game in space. You, the player, start with a rudimentary ship and a skeleton crew, and are tasked to deliver vital information to the other side of a vast and random universe. Every time you ‘jump’ your ship from star system to star system, some completely random event occurs. Maybe you find a shop to buy new weapons and crew for your ship. Maybe it’s some friendly travellers who give you some fuel to help you on your journey. More often than not though, it’s a hostile ship that just wants to blow you out of the sky and steal everything you’ve got. The ship to ship combat is the meat of the game and boy it’s both incredibly good and really quite hard. As with any good roguelike game, death is completely permanent. If you die, then everything you’ve achieved in your journey is dust and you’re sent right back to the start of the game. It’s also here, where the sci-fi nerd in me screams with glee (I hope you’re charging him for your services – Games Ed).

Once in battle, you have to manage both the ship’s power consumption and the actions of your crew. The weapons, shields, engines and a variety of other systems have to be powered to function and you gain bonuses when they are manned by a crew member. As you progress and unlock new weapons, systems, and crew members, you realise how deep the combat is. You can purchase a drone bay and launch automated drones to attack your enemies or repair your ship. You could teleport you crew into your enemy’s ship and pick off the enemy one crew member at a time. Or maybe you prefer buying a cloaking device and being almost impossible to hit. Of course as you progress to more difficult areas your enemies have all these capabilities too. It’s at these points that the game can become incredibly overwhelming, especially on the first few attempts. Often you’re dealing with not only superior firepower, but boarding parties wreaking havoc in your ship and maybe a few fires to top it off. To succeed you must learn to make use of the games pause function. At any point you can stop the action and issue several commands at once. Order one crew member to repair the drone bay maybe? Target your weapons on the enemy’s O2 supply to suffocate the crew? Maybe open an airlock to flush out the boarding party and that pesky fire? Of course when the shit really hits the fan you can always shout, in your best Captain Kirk impression, ‘Divert all power to the engines!!’ and jump the hell out of there. However, due to the random nature of the game, you have absolutely no idea what to expect after that next jump. There have been many situations where I’ve jumped straight from the frying pan and into the fire.

See, the games random component is both its best feature and its worst. To win FTL, you must not rush and should instead focus primarily on preparing for the more difficult battles ahead. Sometimes you get lucky. A few easy battles, a free weapon from a nice stranger and maybe a couple of new crew members enable you to really improve your ships performance. Other times you just jump into empty space, time and time again, gaining nothing and losing fuel. Occasionally, the game can just be incredibly unfair and pit you in an absolutely horrible battle, testing you in every way. However, at the end of the day, each time you hit that ‘New Game’ button you know it’s going to be a different adventure. As you get better and more experienced in the game, you’re rewarded with new starting ships, making each new game even fresher.

As far as true criticisms go, events that don’t involve combat can be a tad dull. Occasionally you’re asked if you want to send some crew members down to a planet, or help a trapped ship stuck in an asteroid field. These events are just displayed in boxes of text with a random outcome. You might gain something useful or suffer damage to your ship or even lose a vital crew member. Also, I’m not a huge fan of the game’s crew-to-crew combat when boarding enemy ships, or being boarded yourself. These instances basically involve your crew and the enemy crew, being in the same room together, slowly picking away at each other’s health. The only real strategy seems to be to know when to quickly move your crew to a different room and it’s far less exciting that the true ship to ship combat. Each attempt at FTL is like its own self-contained episode of Star Trek – just where more often than not, everyone dies at the end. Also, on that note, I’d recommend against naming your starting crew members. I named a female crew member after my girlfriend and she got eaten by a giant spider after about five minutes of playing. It was sad.