I have a special place in my heart for space games. Games like Elite: Dangerous and Starbound. Games that let you travel the endlessness of the cosmos and discover what resides within it. FTL: Faster Than Light is another one of these space games that sits in my heart.
FTL: Faster Than Light is a top-down roguelike strategy game. You play as a captain in the Allied Fleet. You have data about the rebels flagship that is crucial to an Allied Fleet victory. You must travel across eight different sectors, exploring along the way and bettering yourself before the final battle.
To begin your journey you must choose your ship. There are 10 ships total, each with several different layouts, so there ends up being 28 different ships that you can captain.
Each ship and layout is different not just in a visual aspect, but also equipment and crew. There is a different arrangement of what weapons, equipment, and crewmembers you start off with, but can accumulate more powerful things along the way.
After picking your ship you can now customize your crew by changing their appearance and their names. Though you can’t change their species, as this is actually part of what differentiates each of the ships and their layouts.
Each race has a different set of attributes and skills. Like Mantis have higher damage and movement, but lower repair. Or how the Lanius have lower movement speed and drain the oxygen from whatever room they’re in.
Combat is quite fun. Your weapons take a certain amount of time to charge that all differ from one another. This creates scenarios where you have to carefully plan when you want to fire and where you want to aim.
While at the start of the game strategic planning isn’t as necessary, it becomes more and more vital the further you go and the stronger ships you encounter.
Every ship is made of many different systems, some more crucial than others, that you can specifically target to eliminate their function and better your chances in battle. You can target the shield system to disable their shields, or target their life support to slowly suffocate them.
While you can do this to enemy ships, they can also do this to you, so along with trying to destroy the enemy ship, you will also have to focus on having your crew run around the ship repairing your damaged systems.
As you progress through the galaxy, you will have to buy and find upgrades like better weapons, brand new systems like drone control, or passive subsystems like a salvage collector. You can also upgrade your ship’s power distribution any time outside of combat.
Along with ship upgrades, you can improve your crew’s skills. If you have a crew member operate a system for long enough, their skill with that system will improve and give you bonuses when they are manning that system.
Things like a bonus to weapon recharge speeds or an increased chance to dodge enemy fire. You just have to station someone at a station and they will learn to use it more efficiently.
But this game isn’t all combat and improving your ship. In most cases, when you travel to a new planet within a sector, there will be something going on in one way or another.
There are events like combat with pirates or drones protecting storage caches. Moral choices like risking your crew’s safety in an attempt to save others. Or even something simple like navigating an asteroid belt while your FTL drive charges.
Things game is just packed full of so much stuff that it will always be a different experience each time. FTL: Faster Than Light is a game that I keep installed just so that I can play a bit when I have time to kill and I want to do something fun.
And while I do enjoy this game, I can also say that there are things that happen like having a run of bad luck with the random number generator and ending up dying very quickly or losing a crew member you worked really hard to improve, but it’s not a flaw with the game.
These things are part of the FTL experience. A run of bad luck does suck, but every run through can’t be perfect, then there wouldn’t be any challenge and therefore it wouldn’t be fun.
FTL: Faster Than Light can be a difficult game, but it’s fun and creates stories that will never be the same as someone else’s. I recommend FTL if after reading this you have even the slightest interest in it.
Comments
Post a Comment