It may be strange to say so, but you actually want to pick as many fights as you can in FTL, especially at first.
#Ftl faster than light read text full#
Unlocking new gear can be complicated, so don’t expect to have the full fleet at your disposal anytime soon. Best of all, unlocking different ships can change the combat dramatically, as you’ll be with or without certain systems and equipped with different starting weapons. Enemies play by the same rules you do, so they’ll take down your shields and damage your oxygen or engines, and you’ll need to repair them. These are just the basics fights only get more complex as you and your opponents add more powerful weapons and systems.
Pauses in combat allow you to line up shots, while drones can be deployed to wear down defences or protect yours. Time it right and your next shot can hit their weapons systems before the shields return. First you’ll need to take down the enemy shields, which only certain weapons can penetrate. Battles start with an agonising wait while your weapons charge and the ambient music becomes militarised with the bleeps and bloops of systems coming online. Every fight matters because defeat means death – there’s no restarting. More often than not though, you’ll find yourself engaged in FTL’s strongest department: combat, whether against antagonistic aliens, angry rebels or merciless pirates. Each short, text-based scenario (which repeat, but with multiple outcomes) is thankfully well-written and dryly funny. Appear at a new beacon and you might come across an ally or a merchant, or you might have to make a life-or-death decision whether to help a pirate’s prey, or to explore an abandoned space station. You’ll need to traverse across eight in all, but this is a galaxy full of friends and (mostly) foes, peaceful civilian clusters and power-sapping pirate-hiding nebulae, but you always have the same mission and the same final goal. The whole game is about spooling up your FTL drive and jumping to the next beacon, chosen from a randomised map. The clean pixels of your ship and the static backgrounds combine with the calming electronic music to evoke the solitude of space. Engines, weapons and shields are there, along with a few less obvious sub-systems and some more exciting ones you’ll need to pick up along the way. The game screen is dominated by the interior of your ship, split up into various systems. You control a lone Federation cruiser, on the run from ambiguous rebels and armed with some vital information, heading back to the safety of your fleet.
Have you ever watched Battlestar Galactica and wanted control over the fleet’s faster than light travel? Have you ever played Mass Effect and yearned for ship-to-ship combat instead of cover-based shooting and dodgy romances? FTL may just be the answer to both of those questions, and I’m not the only one to think so: it’s one of the first finished products of the fan-funding Kickstarter boom that has swept the games industry.įTL is best described as a top-down space exploration, combat, and survival simulator.
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