FTL: Faster Than Light (A description of it's sales history)

FTL: Faster Than Light is a roguelike game released by Subset Games on the 14th of

September 2012. The games story revolves around a federation spaceship captain, holding some piece of unspecified crucial information that needs to be taken to the federation home planet eight sectors away. I'm presuming that the information isn't that the rebels are about to attack, because if it is then he is hardly giving them any warning, they are so close behind you they can smell the fear in the exhaust fumes of your ship.

The gameplay is fluent and very enjoyable, warping between "Way points" on a map screen aiming to reach an "exit" point in each sector, once you reach the exit point you are simply teleported to another section. While within the games lore and the text shown during encounters the areas do have differences, gameplay wise they are all essentially identical, meaning that the choice presented to the player of which section to go to next is basically pointless.

This might just be me but after a few attempts at the game I eventually stopped reading the text completely, only glancing at it if I was completely lost as to what was going on. However no matter how many bad things I say about this feature, the game more than makes up for it through sheer gameplay. The combat is simple and elegant, it truly feels like commanding a spaceship, deciding which parts of the enemies ship to target with each shot, commanding crew about to fix damage to your vessel and panicking as the enemies weapons charge and the shield seem unsure of whether they will be ready to take the hit.

I feel almost bad about this review, as I haven't yet finished the game, i've never beaten the final boss, and have only unlocked one of the ships, although this was after a brief 18 hours of play time, either I'm terrible at it or the game is a massive timesync. Either way the game definitely gets my recommendation, its a fun game to just sit down and play when you just want to play for a short while, but maybe that's just me again, I don't really survive for that long....

#blogpost #steam #roguelike