FTL: Faster Than Light - Game review

Introduction

FTL: Faster Than Light, more commonly known as just “FTL”, is a science-fiction, strategy, management, and action-adventure video game. It’s pretty unique as games go, and it takes elements from not just other video games, but from other forms of media as well.

Most of the gameplay involves the player controlling the crew of a spaceship and managing their jobs, as well as making executive decisions for where the spaceship travels and how it acts in combat with other spaceships. The decision-making process mainly occurs through explanatory text-crawls that the player chooses a response to, very much in the style of a table-top fantasy game.

FTL was first released in 2012 by indie video game developer Subset Games, with a free expansion FTL: Advanced Edition, being released in 2014 and containing an assortment of added mechanics, ships, and even a unique alien species. The game has very positive reviews from most critics, with an 82% rating for the PC version according to Metacritic.

Story?

FTL, being a text-based game for a large portion of the gameplay, has a nice supporting story for the player to go along with. In it, you control the crew of a vessel of the Galactic Federation, and having just acquired incredibly important tactical information about the weakness of the rebels threatening to overthrow the Federation, must race ahead of the rebel fleet as fast as possible to reach the capital of the Federation, all while upgrading your ship and surviving the other dangers that infest the galaxy along the way.

Players can, over time, unlock different ships and play with different species, all of which can be unlocked by exploring the different aliens’ unique storylines during different playthroughs.

FTL can sort of be described as a roguelike, in that there’s no long-term saving; games are quite short and end in under an hour, but the huge amount of dialogue choices and scenarios that encounter the player as they jump between travel nodes (called FTL, or faster than light travel nodes) make each playthrough unique, and adding all the different ships, weapons and upgrade schemes that the game allows for only serves to persuade the player into replaying FTL enough times to unlock all of the different game modes and explore all the possible quests.

Gameplay

FTL’s gameplay lends itself very much to the fact that it’s a strategy game. Although the player is in control of a spaceship, the player doesn’t get to control how it physically moves around on the screen, only the nodes in interplanetary space it travels to.

The player’s spaceship is displayed top-down on the screen, with the spaceship being divided into several different rooms, some of which can be occupied by ship systems like weapons, engine, piloting, shields, and so on. Players can then control the crew and choose which crew members get to run which systems, allowing them to gain experience and improve the performance of the system they are accustomed to.

This is in times of peace; more often than not, the player will be in the middle of a battle, and th combat system in FTL is quite simple and fun to play around with, if a bit intimidating at first. In combat, an enemy spaceship is displayed alongside the player’s spaceship. Players can control their weapons, choosing which enemy ship rooms or systems are targeted by the weapons, most of which act or behave differently.

There’s also a pause feature, where pressing the “space” key by default stops the gameplay and lets the player choose which commands to make without the pressure of time. Obviously, most actions take a finite amount of time, so pausing the game doesn’t necessarily remove the likely stressing and sweating that I often felt myself reaching when I was pausing between barrages that the enemy flagship was laying into my underprepared and unequipped spaceship.