Developer/Publisher: Subset Games
Release Date: 14 Sep 2012 (
Steam)
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| The artwork is beautiful for its simplicity |
First of all, apologies for the long wait between posts, which were down to a chronic lack of usable free time and lack of motivation. But here I go again, hopefully I'll keep it running this time.
This time, I'll be taking a brief tour of
FTL: Faster Than Light. It's an indie rogue-like set in space, which probably gives some idea of what you'll expect. Death is permanent in this game, you'll have to start from scratch if your ship blows up or you fail your mission, but unlocked ships will persist between games.
So you pick a ship, and a name if you wish but the defaults are normally fine, and set off on your way. The basic premise is that you're attempting to beat the Rebel fleet back to the Federation HQ, passing through friendly and not-so-friendly sectors on the way. The game is challenging and there's a constant drive to improve your ship through upgrades of existing systems using the Ship menu, buying new weapons from Stores, hiring or acquiring the different types of crewmembers, getting augmentations for ships, and adding new systems. There are different types of crewmembers for different purposes. As usual, humans are perceived as the jack-of-all trades, but you have crew types that fit broadly into Tank, DPS, Healer, Buff categories as well, with perks and flaws to balance them out. You start off with only having the choice of a human ship, but getting halfway through a campaign will automatically unlock the Engi ship for the next playthrough.
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| It only gets worse from here |
The game itself is pretty punishing. You jump your ship from system to system until you get to the end, at which point you jump to the next sector. Along the way, you often encounter 'decision' scenarios, where you pick an option and either get a hostile encounter, a reward, a quest, or some other event occurs. In other cases, you'll simply chance upon an enemy anyway, and during hostile encounters there's a chance an event will occur where the ship will either try to escape, offer a bribe (if connected to an event), or offer surrender. The other regular encounter are Stores, where you can buy missiles, fuel, and drones with scrap, the universal currency for purchasing goods and upgrades, as well as a random selection of weapon/drone systems, crew, augmentations, or ship systems. Stores are also the only places you can regularly repair hull damage. The ever-advancing Rebel fleet serves as a motivation to leave the sector, as they'll quickly destroy you if they catch up to you.
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| A poor decision leads to a hostile encounter |
Hostile encounters can be fairly complex affairs, which is why the ability to pause (with spacebar) during battles is particularly useful. Ships are divided into hull segments, which can be independently targeted by individual weapons systems. Hull damage and system damage are also completely independent, and you'll be reliant on your crew (and in some cases, drones) to repair damaged systems and patch hull breaches. However, you can only repair hull damage outside of battle (which makes sense when you think about it) at a Store or during a random event. There are many types of weapons too, with a variety of interesting effects that should occasionally be experimented with. You also have shields to deal with as well, so I find that having a missile weapon is a near necessity in most cases, as they are the only class of weapon guaranteed to penetrate shields (but not to hit, natch).
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| You'll need to save at least some scrap for a trip to the Store |
The upgrading system is interesting too, where pretty much everything revolves around having enough power for your systems as they become more advanced (except 'subsystems', which use no power). You also have the ability to man many systems with crewmembers in order to make them more efficient. It's beneficial to keep crew attached to the same station whenever possible, as they'll get more experience with it and as a result they'll make the system a lot more efficient. Upgrading is a total necessity as you reach the end-game however, which is where you'll be put up against the Rebel fleet for a final standoff.
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| O SHI- |
This game has been out for quite a while now, but it's definitely worth purchasing if you fancy wasting a couple of hours every so often.
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| Get used to this screen. You'll be seeing it a lot. |
So you pick a ship, and a name if you wish but the defaults are normally fine, and set off on your way. The basic premise is that you're attempting to beat the Rebel fleet back to the Federation HQ, passing through friendly and not-so-friendly sectors on the way. The game is challenging and there's a constant drive to improve your ship through upgrades of existing systems using the Ship menu, buying new weapons from Stores, hiring or acquiring the different types of crewmembers, getting augmentations for ships, and adding new systems. There are different types of crewmembers for different purposes. As usual, humans are perceived as the jack-of-all trades, but you have crew types that fit broadly into Tank, DPS, Healer, Buff categories as well, with perks and flaws to balance them out. You start off with only having the choice of a human ship, but getting halfway through a campaign will automatically unlock the Engi ship for the next playthrough.
