Spin up the FTL
Several months ago I backed a game I found on Kickstarter call FTL. I released back in September and I got my code to add it to my Steam account. Then I forgot about it.
This past week, a little burned out on STO and not wanting to get into something as involved as Assassin’s Creed or another Civ game, I fired this little game up. The concept had looked interesting, run a starship and her crew. The graphics were simple but the premise looked cool.
I didn’t have a lot of expectations for the game but I’m quite pleased to report that it’s an enjoyable game. You start out on a Federation ship, the Kestrel. You have a crew of three and you’re mission is to survive to make it back to your HQ while traveling through enemy territory. It’s a short game with only the ability to save if you quit.
You move through eight sectors of space, going to random points that may contain an enemy Rebel scout searching for you, pirates, some other enemy or civilians. Some sectors are in nebula which might effect your sensors or reduce your reactor power. Others might have asteroid fields or be to close to a sun. This adds a nice dimension of exploration with enough randomness that each play through is different.
If you move to slowly through each sector, the Rebel fleet will catch you and you’re boned. But if you go to fast, you’ll reach the end of the map without acquiring enough upgrades and not be strong enough to take on the enemy flagship to win the game. So it’s a balance you have to try for.
During your journey, either at trading posts or as loot, you can acquire upgrades to your ship. You start out with just a basic gun and ship systems. But you can acquire a teleporter, drone control, advanced weapons, cloaking device and many other things. You can also spend “scrap”, the games currency, to upgrade the systems already on your ship.
For example, your reactor will only be able to generate so much energy at the beginning. Not enough to power all your systems. So you’ll have to turn things off to bring other things online. You can increase how much power you generate through upgrades. But you’ll also want to upgrade your systems, increasing the amount of power they need to be fully effective.
Combat is real time with your weapons taking a certain amount of time to charge, shields taking time to regenerate and damage taking time to repair. You’ll have to manage sending crew to man systems, increasing their rate of use, repair damage, defeat boarding parties or board an enemy ship.
Fortunately, you can pause the game, consider the situation, issue some orders, and then unpause the game. This makes the very frantic sense of combat much more manageable. There’s nothing like having your weapon room on fire, an enemy boarding party attacking your weak crew, and be managing some of your own crew trying to disable enemy systems.
The strength of the game lies in it’s replayability. It takes about 2hrs to play through, depending on how much time you spend paused thinking about what to do next. Each time you play the map is different and what you’ll find on your way is different. Some trips, you might not find many crew, others you’ll be overwhelmed with crew, but not be able to find the coolest gun.
Performing certain quests and actions will allow you to unlock new ships to use. These ships all have a different flavor. The starter ship is a nice jack of all trades sort. The Engi cruiser, which is your first unlock, starts you off with a drone upgrade and is more geared to using drones instead of weapons.
It took me a few times to beat the final enemy flagship. You have to fight it three times, each one requiring a bit of a different tactic. The first time I managed to beat it, I used a set of boarding parties to beam over and disable all of its weapons. I also cheated.
See, the game is designed to be played straight through. You can quit and save to come back later if you’re in a safe spot. But if you ever die, or want to quit in the middle of a fight, the save file is deleted. After playing through the game a few times and then losing to the boss ship, I opted for a work around.
Copying the “continue.sav” file allowed me to repaste it after dying and try again. I wouldn’t recommend this to often, as it gets annoying to do and really defeats the purpose of the game. But to get a feel for what you need to do to defeat the boss ship, its helpful to not have to completely replay the game from the start every time you make a small mistake.
Overall, quite a fun little game. It’s got good replayability, at least in the short term. Will it still be fun after a dozen play threws and unlocking all the ships? Who knows, but for $10, you’ll get your money worth with well before that happens.
