I’m not an early bird, but this morning I woke up as giddy as a kid on Christmas morning. I checked FTLgame.com to see if the game had gone on sale early—it had. Maybe it was a glitch, but the price tag was somehow only $9. I tipped them an extra dollar and received my Steam key within seconds. Two minutes later, the game finished downloading. And five minutes after that, I’d finished the tutorial.
So is FTL an easy game? The gameplay is as deep, but picking it up is a helluva lot easier than, say, Microsoft’s Freelancer. This is a game that would be perfect for mobile operating systems like Android and iOS. A comment made by one of the site admins suggests it will eventually make it there.
There are three crewmen available from the start. I name one after myself (he’ll be the captain, of course) and keep the randomly generated names for the other two souls onboard: Sem and Maria, who mostly stick to the engine room and the shield generator respectively. We set sail into the wide unknown, pushing the outer edge of the proverbial final frontier.
After a couple of dogfights, which couldn’t be avoided, a distress call is transmitted from a pirate ship wedged between a couple of space rocks. It’d be easy to blast the wounded ship to oblivion and collect whatever cargo survives, but I remember Captain Picard’s policy of keeping the peace and decide to help. Ironically, the trapped ship is destroyed during by attempt to save it. I shrug and make the jump to the next destination, knowing I did my best.
Soon there’s a decision to be made. While the rebel fleet is hot on my ship’s trail, we can travel through a hostile sector or try to make our way through a nebula, which will shut down certain portions of the system’s electronics. I decide to risk the nebula and, hopefully, avoid a number of space battles in the process.
Traveling through a nebula is eerie despite the simple graphics and cheerful chip tunes. The ship’s sensors shut down and suddenly we’re piloting blind. We encounter a few hostiles along the way, but most of the time we can use the nebula as cover and slip by… most of the time.
Crippled by the nebula, pirates rendezvous with and board my ship. Because the sensors are down, I have no idea what’s going on except for in the rooms that contain crew members. So, blindly, I open all the outer doors and try to flush the hijackers out. Did it work? I assume it did until the door to Maria’s shield room turns red: pirates are breaching it. I command her to escape into an adjacent room and open all the doors between the outside of the ship and the shield room. The hijackers run out of oxygen just in time. Another narrow escape—is there really any other kind?
Scrap is currency in FTL. The longer you survive, the more you earn. I avoid encounters, whenever possible, and help wounded enemies rather than capitalize on their misfortune. I don’t make much scrap as I could. I come across some good deals in the cosmos, but I can rarely afford to partake. Thus is the life of an honest ship captain.
Eventually we get a distress call from a planet on which an infectious disease is spreading. The government there can use our help, but it would be wise for us to keep moving. I send a party down to the planet, anyway. Seriously, though: WWCPD? (What would Captain Picard do?) We successfully help them stop the infection from spreading further, but one of my crew is showing symptoms of the illness himself. I’ll be damned if it isn’t my player character: Captain Grant.
Sem and Maria leave him behind and share piloting duties. Things go pretty smoothly despite my absence. Maria is later killed when asteroids rain down on the ship during an escort mission. Sem narrowly escapes, but helps a wounded ally to safety. For the first time the ship is wealthy in scrap. At the next stop, Sem hires two alien crewmen to take up his fallen comrades’ duties. All is well until they encounter a seriously overpowered rebel drone in the most hostile of environments. There’s no hope for Sem and his alien crewmen, but they put up a hell of a fight.
There are no saves to spam. No second chances. “Game Over” means your game is truly over. FTL is roguelike in that respect. I wish there was another mode in which there was some sort of end goal to obtain so that you could claim you had beaten it. As is, your only goal is to see how far you can get, how much you can explore. In the end, I’ve destroyed ten ships, collected more than four hundred units of scrap, and responded to forty-eight distress calls.
Nonetheless, FTL is one of the best games of the year. In fact, if you’re a fan of frequently returning to the freedom of creativity allowed in Freelancer, you’re likely to get a lot of mileage out of this one. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have another crew to doom.
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