The first release by indie developer Subset Games, FTL: Faster than Light is a top-down roguelike that is equal parts RPG and Strategy game.
‘You detect a rebel scout on an attack approach to a small refuelling outpost. Their weapons are charged, but they’re not firing yet.’
Do you fancy yourself as a Jean-Luc Picard or a General Palpatine? A savior, or a destroyer?
You could intervene and defend the outpost. This puts you at risk of becoming another floating piece of space debris in the infinite cosmos, but survive and you could be hailed as a hero. Imagine the rewards: another crewman would be invaluable and a few more missiles will tip the odds in your favor in your future life-or-death battles against the rebel fleet.
FTL: Faster Than Light, has given you a choice. What do you do?
As the title suggests, the player controls a ship capable of faster-than-light travel, - property of the Galactic federation. After intercepting a data packet, countless text based encounters stand between you and your destination of Federation Headquarters. Precisely what and who you lose and gain along the way will be different in every playthrough. The game is kept ever more interesting and captivating through the use of these random encounters: no two runs will be the same; the player can’t rely on their memory to help them choose the correct outcome. It’s possible to die halfway across the seven sectors. It’s equally possible to die in the very first encounter. FTL is a game of chance, albeit one where the odds are stacked against you from the outset. Even on ‘normal’ difficulty I soon discovered that the probability of my crew surviving to the end was slim to none - which I imagine is a true representation of a three man crew trying to navigate through the bottomless black.
Seven races offer their services depending upon the ship you pilot. Initially the only available ship is ‘The Kestrel’, manned by three humans; but every ship has the capacity to carry eight, so the more the merrier. You’ll require quick responses in battle to repair on the fly; some of the more advanced warships are able to take out multiple ship systems in one laser-sweeping blow. Each of these systems is critical to the survival of your crew. Oxygen is key to survival or course, so when this your air supply system takes critical damage a red tint starts to seep through the ship sections getting darker and darker until finally they’re the deep crimson color of blood - an obvious warning sign that there’s some sort of danger or warning.
Shields are key if you don’t want to become scrap. As soon as they’re damaged your hull is open to attacks, increasing the chance another one of your systems becoming compromised. I found weapons tended to be attacked more than other systems, so I would have as many crew members as I could spare on standby, immediately flooding the room with them as soon as the systems were damaged. Becoming a sitting duck is a swift way to find yourself sent to an early asteroid grave.
More systems can be added to your ship as you progress, with each having two different layouts; one directly available, the second unlocked by completing in-game achievements with that ship. One ship may be equipped with droid control from the get go, while another may sacrifice this for teleportation, allowing one of the crew members to go all out on an enemy crew. These can all be purchased from the stores that float throughout the system along with crew members - purchased from slave ships - and droids for the drone controller; the usefulness of droids ranges from their ability to repair damaged systems or the hull, shooting down enemy missiles and attacking the enemy.
Each sector involves traversing around a star map towards the green exit beacon in the hope of a temporary escape from the rebels. More often than not there’s a choice in which way you would like to go - though always into the unknown - but like a two year old with the attention span of a goldfish, it’s easy to go off-course; occasionally distress signals are detected, showing up on the in-game map: clear signs that someone needs assistance that only a space captain such as yourself can provide. You know there’s bound to be rewards for acts of valiance, but your innocence may sometimes be played upon by interplanetary scum lay waiting in a trap; and as you look back on that particular permadeath and think maybe a purchase of an ion cannon would have been smart, you cannot help but restart, FTL burrows its way into you making you want to progress further each time and best yourself, changing your tactics, possibly taking a turn into the clouded nebula to see what races lay waiting to join your mission.
Augmentations can be game changers, the Mister Spock to your Captain Kirk, all of which can be summarized into the offense, defense, miscellaneous and FTL engine categories. These augmentations give each player the ability to customize their skills. The 
majority have to be bought, and some are exclusive to certain models of ship, such as the Zoltan shield, which provides an extra sturdy layer of shielding and can absorb damage from almost any weapon. Combat is based on a simple rock-paper-scissors mechanic that should be familiar to anyone that’s ever played a strategy game in the past. Particular weapons are only effective in certain situations. A particular favorite that I came across - and also key to my longest playthrough - was the weapon pre-ignite. The pre-ignite is your basic equivalent of a preemptive strike, allowing you to fire off the opening shot in a fight. Other weapons such as the breach, which normally require a whole twenty-two seconds to charge, were no longer a handicap using pre-ignite. The only negative that came to spending one-hundred-and-twenty scrap on this fantastic invention was that I could no longer afford fuel. This wasn’t the fault of the game: I jumped at the opportunity to vanquish all foes, but I failed to consider the long-term consequences: how this expenditure could limit my ability to cope with other scenarios.
The sprite-based art style helps create this winning formula, and it does not lack style; the pixel designs are tightly packed, chocked full of detail, helping to fill your imagination of the clean innards of a space vessel. It is excellent to have such an old, retro art style used for a game set centuries in the future. Each crew member, respective of their race has cute five frame animations for whatever recent order you have given them; be that working at the computers to speed up the regeneration of your shield, or working away to repair the broken oxygen system, these little workers are given character beyond just their names. Past your space ship, which occupies the center of the screen you get a real sense of the unknown as distant planets are drawn in smaller than your dwarf sized ship, with their own suns peaking from behind their blue atmospheric glow.
FTL is entirely a game of chance. The longer you manage to hold out, getting closer to the end, a fear of making the ‘wrong’ choice grows ever-larger. Should you choose to help someone’s ship to rescue survivors? The crew might all be infected by a rage like virus which then infects one of your valuable crew members. It could be as simple a choice as deciding to fight pirates, who turn out to be better-equipped than you first though. FTL: Faster Than Light can often seem unfair with the consequences you have to deal with and more often than not, one trip up can lead to a tumble down a treacherous asteroid pelted slope, but really it’s just life dealing you a raw hand.
But that’s enough from me. The distress beacon is coming from a civilian ship. It appears that it’s being chased by a pirate. Or perhaps it’s an ambush; either way, I’m about to find out.
I recommend you buy this game and make the decision that will shape your crew.
