Recently released was a small indie game named FTL, or Faster Than Light, and after an eight-hour stint of WoW yesterday (WHY) I grabbed it and began to play. Then I went to bed very late. This is some SERIOUSLY addictive stuff right here.
FTL is described as a “spaceship simulation real-time roguelike-like”. This isn’t an inaccurate description. The premise is that you are the captain of a Federation starship carrying vital intelligence to put down a massive rebellion, and you’ve got to make it back to Federation space to deliver it. You do so by travelling across a number of sectors in space, jumping from star to star and investigating or dealing with whatever you find at each one, be it a station in distress, a trader, a pirate, a pirate disguised as a pirate, and so forth. Always trying to stay one step ahead of the rebels, who will sweep across each sector as you cross it and give you a serious incentive to press on.
But of course each consecutive sector is tougher and contains stronger threats, so you also want to explore and see what you can gather in order to upgrade your ship (Or just repair it after the inevitable damage you take), recruit new crewmembers, and so forth. When you’re in combat is when the real fun begins, and it’s the part that they mean when they say “real-time”. You have to juggle a number of things going on at once, directing your crew to the posts you need manned (Most things operate without crew, but they can make it work better and they can gain experience to increase this further) or reacting to various things occurring shipboard such as fires breaking out, systems taking damaged, or boarders teleporting over. Meanwhile you’ve got to decide how to use your various weapons against the enemy, what to target, whether to use or conserve missiles, and so on and so forth. It doesn’t look like much but once you’re in there it gets pretty freaking tense and engaging.
At almost every star you visit you will be presented with a short text event requiring you to make a decision. Do you try and help that civilian ship under attack by pirates, or hope to sneak past? Do you want to investigate that abandoned station or just move on? These events form one of the cores of the game, and the whole thing depends on decisions you make in one way or another. They also tend to consist of the good old standbys of shows like Star Trek, so if you’ve ever wanted to deal with various unpleasant space gribblies, this is the game for you!
As for the “roguelike” appellation, well. This is some random shit right here. Your starting ship is predefined but almost everything after that, from the weapons you might find at a store to the events you encounter to the sectors within the galaxy itself is randomized. Some games will give you an easy time, some will bend you over and make you squeal like a schoolgirl on prom night. This is a game to be played and replayed, not played through once and put aside; each play will probably last under an hour and each time what you largely gain is knowledge and experience (You, the player, that is) although there are some unlocks that mix things up a good deal.
It’s also a game of hubris. Some boarders have teleported over and are attacking your weapons bay? Well we’ll just see how they like it if I vent all the air. Heh. Oh crap, their ship just blew up my O2 room. And now they’ve sabotaged my door controls so I can’t close the airlocks again. Now I’ve got to try and repair the O2 room AND door control with the air supply rapidly depleting and oh everyone is dead. The game explicitly tells you to be prepared to lose, and like any roguelike or Dwarf Fortress, that’s an attitude you’ll need to get very far with this. Losing is Fun. Still, Losing can Hurt as well, though funnily enough total defeat hurts less than losing a single crewmember can. Just between their name and a few experience-based stats you can grow attached to the little guys, and when one gets killed I tend to feel some guilt and sorrow – “Mattz was with us from the start, he saved the ship more than once! And I let him die!”
You can grab it now from Steam or GoG.com and I highly recommend you do so, it’s only the price of a movie ticket and you’ll get much more fun from this. EDIT: Thanks to commenter neothoron, who pointed out that you can also get FTL from the game’s official website for Windows/OSX/Linux, comes with a Steam key, and is DRM-free.