Faster than Light (FTL) is a spaceship management game, but don’t let that description scare you off. That is just the simplest way of describing this experience. In actuality it is a survival game, where you desperately flee through the depths of space away from an enemy fleet, with a small ship, smaller crew and limited fuel and ammo. Along the way you’ll fight pirates, giant slugs and rock monsters. Your chances of survival are minimal, and there is no restarting from a save point. Once you die, you die. It is a tense, taut experience and a game can last as little as half an hour depending on how bad your luck runs.
This game is one of the first games to come out of Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website that allows new developers to be funded by their potential fans rather than investors. Seeing as it is a relatively new business model, one based on blindly handing your money to a complete stranger who may or may not give you the final product you hope for, people have been anxiously waiting for this first wave of crowdfunded games to be released to see if this is a viable method of making games. The good news is that if FTL is anything to go by, then the industry is going to see some incredible, experimental and imaginative games released over the next few years.
FTL works on the same principles as old fashioned roguelike games from the 80s and 90s, though using them in a new, unusual way. The player controls an entire ship. They start off with three crew members, one of whom has to pilot the ship. There’s an engine room, a shield room, a weapons room, medbay, oxygen room, CCTV room and a door control room. Something goes wrong, your crew need to go into that room and fix the problem or that function won’t work. If the weapons room gets damaged you can’t fire, if the CCTV room gets damaged you’re essentially blind, if the oxygen room gets damaged you slowly begin to asphyxiate to death. Not a pleasant way to go.
This, combined with the ability to target specific spots on an enemy ship, means that combat is an intensely tactical experience. First you might want to get rid of their shields so you can damage them more, but you might want to get rid of their weapons first so they stop killing you. Every move is a gamble made in a split second, and while you might spend 2 hours breezing your way through battle after battle, all it takes is for one thing to go wrong and it can all go downhill in seconds. The combat, while being tactical, is far from being slow-paced. Fighting is always a race against the clock. If you face someone too strong you need to hold them off long enough to power up your engines and escape, someone too weak and you need to kill them before they escape and bring reinforcements.
The fact that each playthrough is randomised means no two games are the same, one game you might end up obliterated and hilariously outgunned by an enemy, in another a small fire on one end of your ship can go unnoticed in the heat of battle and slowly consume all the oxygen in the ship. It’s almost infinite in its replayability, a feature many games overlook these days. There’s no real story, at least not one the player will pay any attention to. There is a generic group of enemies chasing the player, while the player tries to reach their generic allies. Ultimately it’s just a backdrop for players to create their own stories. It feels a little like Firefly and BattleStar Galactica meshed together, with epic combat mixed with exploration and adventure, which helps any fan of science fiction get in the mood to play this game.
Despite this, it can get a little frustrating. The control system seems a little fiddly, and in the heat of combat players will find themselves accidentally opening airlocks, sending people to the wrong room and powering up the wrong weapons. It makes losing all that more galling when the player knows that it was the lack of a neat interface that killed them. Furthermore, the 16-bit graphics and the inability to go back to a checkpoint or save file after dying will be a little hard for players used to Call of Duty and Battlefield 3 to get used to, though with the rise of Minecraft and indie games in general the excuse of less modern graphics making games inaccessible is getting increasingly ridiculous.
It is hard to fault this game in any other way though. The soundtrack is beautiful and very fitting, the game is well designed and will test gamers. FTL won’t be for everyone, but then again it doesn’t have to be. It is recreating a genre that was almost extinct for the modern age, and it does it well. It’s a beautiful game, made with a level of professionalism that show that Kickstarter may be the future of funding games. With a variety of ships, enemies, crew members, weapons, you won’t get bored anytime soon, and with a price tag of about £5.00, you’re definitely getting your money’s worth.
