By ALEXANDER PECHA
Arts Editor
“FTL: Faster Than Light” is a rogue-like starship game where you simulate bashing your head against a wall for two hours before eventually giving up in despair and then going back a week later for another two hours of head bashing. That’s the short version of “FTL: Faster Than Light.”
The long version is that if you’ve ever had a fantasy of commanding the crew of a starship to deal with your various starship issues, like trying to maintain systems while in a prolonged ship-ship fight, or trying to repair a burning and mostly-destroyed ship after a disaster, then “FTL” is for you.
You take on the role of a crew of a ship that has been tasked by the Federation (and no, it’s not that Federation) to bring vital intelligence to the Federation fleet while being pursued by a hostile rebel fleet. To accomplish this goal you “jump” from beacon to beacon, which are separate encounters inside a sector.
Traveling to a beacon takes resources, and each time you “jump” the rebel fleet gets closer; however, you need to advance to get to your final objective. Also, each beacon holds the promise of possible rewards that you can use to upgrade your ship, though it’s equally possible to find a threat that simply outclasses you and you get blown to tiny ship pieces.
This would probably be a good time to mention the fact that you’re going to die in “FTL.” A lot. As a roguelike game, every-time you’re defeated you go back to the start of the game.
This makes every encounter that much more tense, as the further you progress, the more you risk running into an obstacle that beats you and sends you back to square one. This system makes it so that every choice seems important, and the number of times I’ve sat and watched as my ship blew up and thought to myself, “If only I had bought a few more missiles,” or something to that effect is mind-boggling.
The game is played from a top-down perspective. You take strategic control of each crew member, as well as the actual ship operations, from the same screen. Crew stationed in certain rooms like the engine room or shield room give bonuses to those locations and as a result give bonuses to the ship system they represent.
Plus, if a torpedo hits that particular room, you don’t have to rush someone there to fix it. The game can be paused at any time to allow you to take hold of the situation and figure out a plan, not that being able to pause makes dying any less likely.
This is offset slightly by how inventive you can get with your gameplay strategies. Want to just shoot an enemy’s shields and torpedo them until they blow up? You can do that. However, if you want to get creative, you can do things like beam your crew aboard and take over the enemy ship, or use a well-placed torpedo and destroy the enemy ship’s life support, suffocating them all to death. Or, if you get boarded, you can vent the atmosphere from your own ship and suffocate the enemy boarders.
There are a lot of strategies in this game and a lot of strategic depth, even if a lot of strategies end in the enemy suffocating the vacuum of space. (Or are those just my strategies?)
Praise for the game’s difficulty and rogue-like features aside, it’s hard to ignore the fact that it can get frustrating. Usually, after getting really far only to be destroyed, I’ll walk away from the game for months at a time. To this day, the end boss is still a pain and I have yet to kill the damned thing. Essentially, if you can’t handle the idea of occasionally having all your hard work mean absolutely nothing, then “FTL” won’t be the game for you.
One of the best parts of “FTL” is that, like a lot of games I talk about, it can be run on a toaster, but unlike other games it’s hard to overstate just how easy this thing is to run on a computer. It has an iPad edition, just for reference.
This is mostly because if the game was just a tad simpler, which would take away from its charm, it could be a flash game. The graphics are 2D, and as such, even though they’re stylized, they’re nothing to write home about.
In the end, if the idea of a game where you get to take control of a starship much like the USS Enterprise from Star Trek (if the Enterprise exploded every other episode and was replaced by a new ship named the “USS Ihatethisgame”) then “FTL” is for you. It has fun yet challenging gameplay combined with a cool idea and unlockables to keep you playing after you beat it; which, if you do, call me, because I still haven’t.
