![]() Very little is animated, aside from dinky crewmen puttering around inside your ship and various rockets and missiles being blasted across the void between you and the many enemies that you encounter during your travels. The only other main screen to note governs upgrades to your ship's core systems and how to equip weapons and other gear. You spend most of your time looking at an overhead schematic of your vessel seen in front of a spartan backdrop consisting of a planet, nebula, asteroid field, or whatever other scrap of intergalactic real estate dominates the star system that you are currently exploring. The game consists of just a couple of screens. Graphics are intentionally pixelated, particularly the big, blocky text used to provide ship information and menu options. What first strikes you about Faster Than Light is how old-fashioned it looks and sounds. ![]() Unlike space sims that make you feel like you've had your head jammed in a Jefferies tube during an ion storm (if we can mix sci-fi franchises for a moment), this lighter entry in the genre combines an endearing retro feel and an even more endearing $10 price tag with gripping gameplay packed with tough choices and frenetic combat.īattles may look dry and uninvolving, though that sure isn't the case when you're the one loading the weapons and putting out the fires. This spaceship simulation may look like something from the golden age of 16-bit gaming, but it offers a good deal of fun and depth. It's a game I'm glad I'm bad at.Faster Than Light might not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid. ![]() FTL to me is a little thing I boot up for 15 minutes so it can tell me a story. I sympathise, but I've never completed the game and have no desire to do so. To not follow that strategy is to willfully play the game poorly. There is, I'm told, only one real strategy possible if you want to beat the game and defeat its ultimate enemy. Whenever I read about FTL these days I read about people who are disappointed with its balance. They're simple little stories, but the decisions make them yours and the last-second escapes, desperate sprints into vacuum-exposed rooms, and crushing defeats make them memorable. The next system will bring a different kind of encounter: a derelict ship with a potentially crazed person on board you can rescue or abandon a slaver ship from whom you can accept slaves a station, which you can use to restock fuel, repair your battered hull and install new weapons or any one of dozens of other sci-fi plots. You survive the encounter but just barely. ![]() One of their lasers causes a fire in your engine room and disables your ability to run away, and so you send in one of your crew - named after a friend, no doubt - to brave the flames and repair the equipment. 'Give us one of your crew,' they say, and you decide to refuse and fight them. Arriving in a new system might see your ship immediately beset upon by an enemy vessel. ![]() It's thrilling.īut mainly, it brings stories. Each new system visited brings with it drama, tough choices, high comedy, and the very high possibility of death. You are in control of the crew of a spaceship and forced to race across the galaxy. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.įTL is a Star Trek episode generator. Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. ![]()
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