Straight to the Point – This kickstarter success story is a superb yet simple roguelike game with its intense tactical combat and random adventures making it well worth its remarkably cheap price of seven pounds.
Crewman Christoff is dead, cornered in a corridor by the gunnery room and torn to pieces by two Mantis warriors who are now one flimsy bulkhead away from my precious O2 generators. Their rampage has started a fire which is now spreading out of control through the engine room while the Mantis cruiser which beamed these two monstrosities aboard readies its beam cannons to fire upon my vessel.
Things do not look good, either the Mantis will kill my remaining crew; the ship will be blown to bits, the ship will burn up from the inside or everyone will die from asphyxiation due to lack of oxygen.
It’s the Mantis cruiser which gets me in the end, its beam cannons breaking down my shields and removing the last few hull points of my ship which slowly breaks apart as the last members of my crew die from decompression.
This is not an unusual description of one of my many play throughs of FTL: Faster than light, a fiendishly difficult yet addictive game which I best describe as a Crisis Management sim in space.
Your mission is straightforward; as the captain of a Federation starship you must travel, or more accurately flee as fast as possible from a Rebel fleet, across the galaxy to deliver crucial intelligence to your commanders. The game itself is fairly light on narrative story, instead relying on the random encounters you have along the way to make its own storyline for you.
The game is short and focused, each journey will not probably last more than an hour at a time. However with ‘Permadeath’ at the core of the game, if you die its game over and because you can’t save the game at any point, each battle takes on a sense of urgency and desperation that extends its appeal. This is quite a refreshing change compared to the usual hand holding of many games as one mistake could mean the loss of a vital crew member or even your entire ship but when you successfully bring it back from the brink of defeat the feeling is euphoric.
Your ship is viewed from a top-down 2D perspective, you begin only with the most basic of vessels but multiple new ship types can be unlocked by completing missions in game, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You start with three crew members but more can be recruited from the various galactic races but expect to lose some to random events or enemy action. These crew members can be selected and ordered to work in the specific rooms where your four primary systems (weapons, shields, engines and thrusters) are housed or repair damage/repel borders as a battle develops so the crew quickly take shape with each fulfilling the roles of a classic science fiction star ship such as pilot, gunnery officer, chief engineer or security officer.
To traverse the galaxy you must journey along a branching path of nine different systems, when you enter a system you must travel from one side to another via a series of randomly generated jump beacons which normally have some kind of encounter awaiting you. These encounters vary from saving space stations under attack, exploring deserted colonies and battles with any number of rebels, pirates or slavers.
After each encounter you may receive rewards, this takes the form of fuel which is used for each FTL jump and running out of fuel is always an ongoing concern, missiles which are useful for some of the more powerful weaponry in the game or ‘scrap’ which is the games currency that can be used either to upgrade your ship or to purchase items, crew or weapons from vendors you meet along your travels.
Obviously travelling to as many encounters as possible nets you more rewards, however the rebel fleet are always in pursuit, represented by an expanding red line within each sector which if it catches up with you means a difficult and often fatal fight against a vastly superior rebel ship. It presents an intriguing risk versus reward element as there is not enough time to explore every system and find every encounter so it pays to plan ahead. Taking a risk and finding that hidden supply cache in a far flung corner of the system is incredibly rewarding although it can go the other way and leave you stranded to be blown to oblivion by the pursuing rebels.
The majority of these resources will be spent upgrading your ship which is a balancing act all in itself, there are the four primary systems and multiple subsystems such as sensors, medical bay and the O2 generators, all of which have to draw power from your central reactor if they’re to work. You can upgrade each system or the central reactor but each must keep pace with the other, if you have too many system upgrades you won’t be able to power them all at the same time but if the reactor has too many upgrades its power is essentially wasted.
This leads onto a core mechanic of FTL which is managing your ship, crew and power levels, especially during combat which you command but do not actually take direct control. You don’t avoid incoming enemy fire with some adroit use keyboard nor are you aiming and firing weapons beyond telling them where to fire and leaving the AI to do the actual business. Your role is closer to that of a Star Trek captain managing the ship by allocating power and crew to each system and keeping an eye on everything else that is going on in the meantime.
While subsystems like the medical bay and the O2 generators are all allocated power automatically (though you can turn them off to allocate elsewhere in an emergency) the four primary systems can have their power levels juggled as required so if you absolutely need to boost your shields at the expense of your engines you can do so. You can also assign crew members to work on each primary system which improves their performance in combat with the crewman granting you faster regeneration of your shields or greater accuracy of your weapons, for example. Because of this systems and sub-systems are the primary targets in battle so it’s up to you to manage their power levels and keep them healthy, protected and repaired.
This is not always an easy task, especially during a hectic battle when the shields fail or fire rages across the ship. The different weapon and even the hostile environments can make each battle develop differently. Lose your shields in an asteroid field for example and expect to be repairing numerous hull breaches from asteroid strike, Nebulas make your sensors ineffective so good luck tracking those boarding parties or my personal favourite of jumping into orbit with a star whose solar flares set fire to the ship, which is always fun when your being bombarded by missiles from an irate pirate at the same time.
Weapons vary widely, the more powerful require more energy to use and each is used different with Lasers the good all rounder’s, beam weapons are useless against shields but can slice easily though multiple rooms and damage their primary systems, Missiles ignore shields so are very powerful but can be shot down by special drones, teleporters can transport crew to the other ship which causes havoc, especially the aforementioned Mantis warriors which can do lots of damage. All in all, expect things to go bad very quickly as they often invariably do.
As I have said before it’s the crisis management aspect of the battles which get the adrenaline going, take the example at the start of this review. How could I have got out it with all those disasters happening at the same time? I could have ordered the crew to put out the fires, making the ship less effective by abandoning their stations but containing the damage or I could have just opened the airlocks nearby to put them out by sucking out the oxygen in the engine room. This would also have killed the Mantis borders if I locked them near the O2 generators and vented the rooms to asphyxiate them. With the fire and borders dealt with I could then boost my shields to absorb the fire from the Mantis Cruiser and then fired my shield-penetrating missiles to do a bit of damage to one of their systems but which one should I choose? Do I go for their gunnery room to stop them firing which buys me time to make some more repairs or hit their shield generators so they are more vulnerable to my follow up shots? These quick decisions, the hectic goings on of battle as you try to manage three things at once are what make the game so fun.
There are bad points to the game, the difficulty level does not seem to scale at all as you progress but spikes about three quarters of the way through with opposing ships going from nothing more dangerous than a pirate tug boat to heavily armoured cruisers. It is also a shame that there are not more ‘diplomatic’ solutions to problems or alternative ways to deal with the encounters as some of them are recycled again and again, with ‘escaped prisoner’ beaming aboard or space stations needing evacuating you will have seen most of them after a couple of play throughs but I hope that new challenges will be introduced with future patches or DLC.
That said it has enough replay value with the randomly generated galaxy to come back again and again to try another adventure, for an asking price of less than seven pounds I would recommend this game to anyone who fancies trying their hand at being the Star Trek Captain we almost all wanted to be at one stage or another growing up.