FTL: Faster Than Light is a Kickstarter success story, and hopefully one that will set an example for those who follow in its foot steps. Started by a two-man crew, FTL has quickly grown from a little indie kickstarter to a wildly popular indie title featured on the front page of the Steam Store, and released through GoG. I’m pretty late to the party on this one, I only heard about it from one of the other writers while we were talking about Black Mesa Source’s release. I’m glad he so adamantly mentioned it, however.
The ship GatherYourParty, manned by Tim Minkov, Matt Reichardt, and myself.
FTL: Faster Than Light features a rather unique mode of space battle. Instead of controlling the ship directly, and firing the lasers and torpedo’s yourself, the game functions as a hybrid between an RPG and an RTS. You don’t actually control where your ship flies, but you do control the positions and actions of the people manning the ship. This is much more akin to how I imagine an actual space ship operating. As the captain of the ship, you assign orders to your crew, such as repairs, manning a station (which adds a small bonus to what ever operation the station performs), piloting, fighting enemies that board your ship, and even more.
At first, when Mike described the game to me, I thought it sounded a little wonky, like it was going to be extremely difficult to learn or the controls were just going to be unwieldy. The game play is rather natural, however. The weapons system is similar to EvE Online, where you have a weapon (e.g. a laser, or a missile launcher) which takes up power from your reactor. Your weapons then go through a “loading” cycle, and then you can set them to either auto-fire, or you can individually select and shoot each one. In the beginning of the game you only have two, so it’s fairly easy to manage them without the auto-fire system, but I’m sure farther into the game it becomes more difficult, especially if you combine in micro-managing your crew around.
Whilst fighting in a nebula
When you attack another ship, you can select a target and fire at a different part of the ship. This is a really interesting system because you can choose to destroy certain systems on the other ship, such as weapons systems, or the engines, or the shields, and this grants you a leg up on the enemy. Later on you can upgrade sensors to be able to view the ships interior and target individual crew members. As I’ve progressed I’ve found that you should focus on destroying the shields first, and then move on towards other parts of the ship, specifically weapon systems and things pilot positions.
In nebula’s your sensors don’t work, causing vision to be extremely limited.
The detail put into this game is really excellent. The battling system is interesting and intense, forcing you to decide whether you want the evasion bonus of a guy manning the engine system, or if you want to put the fire out in the medical bay. There is even a tactic to open your hull doors and leak the oxygen out of different rooms to put the fire out. Honestly, there is so much effort put into this game that the paltry $8.99 Steam and GoG are charging for the game is nothing. The game may not be for everyone, but for me it’s one of the more creative and interesting games I’ve played lately.
I was worried about kickstarter. It’s good to see that we finally get a finished project from kickstarter.
I was going to do a review of this but I pretty much lost my weekend to it.
Do a second opinion of it, I’m sure you can give a much more detailed account of it since I was split between Black Mesa and this, and to be honest I spent a lot more time on Black Mesa.
Not worth the 6£/8$.
Pirate it and buy homeworld 2 instead.
Rather than getting Nexus: TJI which is much closer to this game than Homeworld is?
As much as i love nexus, homeworld is the better game.
Homeworld maybe, Homeworld 2 was rather simplified compared to its predecessor and in the final acts, plot holes started appearing everywhere. Also, still kind of annoyed about how the game doesnt tell you about the free teleportation power you get in the final mission.
This game is obscenely hard, but a blast to play. I can’t count how many times I’ve narrowly escaped a towering rebel ship, or destroyed another vessel before asteroids wrecked my hull. On the other hand, I can’t remember how many times I thought I was doing great, only to run out of gas or realize that my O2 had been out for the past 30 seconds. Those other games sound interesting, but looking into them, I prefer FTL simply because it is easy to get into.
It kills my perfectionism. Every time any of my crew die I just want to start the game over. It’s the reason I haven’t made it past the 3rd or 4th sector.
FTL really is magnificent, and the soundtrack alone is worth the $9, though sadly the superior GoG release doesn’t package the entire soundtrack with it. My guess is they made a backroom deal to only give the entire soundtrack on Steam to ensure that the Steam version would have any sales at all.
I only have two problems with FTL: unlocking new ships is sometimes a matter of pure luck, and the automatic repair droid doesn’t prioritize repairs well.