FTL: Faster Than Light
“Travelling through hyperspace ain’t like dustin’ crops, boy…”
You probably already know how to play FTL.
Theoretically, anyway (if not mechanically). FTL is every space-faring sci-fi you’ve ever watched. It’s Star Trek. It’s Battlestar. It’s Firefly. It’s basically any program in which the heroes fly around in a bitchin’ spaceship, cracking wise and making life-or-death decisions on a weekly basis. If you’re familiar with any of these shows (or their numerous brethren), a knowing smile will creep over your face when FTL presents its short tutorial.
Because you already know it all.
You know that you’re going to have to redirect power from life-support to your shields when you’re under a barrage of laser-fire. You know that it’s sometimes OK for your pilot to abandon the helm, because that fire isn’t going to douse itself. You know that, when push comes to shove, you’d fire on your own ship if you thought it was the only way to destroy the boarding party currently rampaging around your vessel.
FTL succeeds, brilliantly, because it puts you right there in the captain’s chair, forcing you to make these calls. And it doesn’t need to render the chair in an eye-blistering number of polygons to do it (though there might be a chair sprite in there somewhere; I honestly didn’t notice).
It all starts with the ship. As is always the case with roguelikes, you’ll begin with the basics: bog-standard ship (pre-set as ‘The Kestrel’, but feel free to smash a bottle of champers off the side and call it whatever you like), affixed with the laser equivalent of a spud gun and a handy rocket launcher, and three “lucky” crew members. You’re given a deliberately vague one-sentence mission brief (“You have data. Get it the fuck away from the pursuing enemy”), along with a couple of tips for staying alive, and sent out into the great unknown.
At its most basic level you’ll be plotting a course from one side of a sector (of which there are eight) to the other, jumping (using your Faster Than Light drive, of course) between the various nodes scattered across the map. Every node will have a short descriptor of what’s going on at that location, and most will have something to do. That’s your core loop, then: jump, resolve node, jump, resolve node…
OF COURSE it’s far more interesting than that, though. FTL is all about systems and resources (do stay with me). More specifically, it’s about your ability to manage those systems and resources in such a way as to negotiate each node and sector successfully. Even more specifically, it’s about trying to figure out how the hell you can possibly survive another jump when you desperately need to repair your hull but you can only afford to fix it if you don’t shell out for some new weaponry but your current setup is way too underpowered to deal with the constant enemy threat and oh god I’ve flown into an asteroid field now we’re all fucked.
It’s classic risk/reward, not only in your purchase and upgrade decisions, but also in your route-planning. Your gut might initially tell you to take the shortest route to the exit, which I gleefully did on my first run, but you’ll die. Horribly. Ignoring other nodes, and their potential fuel, ammo, and scrap (currency), leaves you far too weak to deal with the increasing threat. But don’t think you can just fly around farming, though. The Rebel Fleet is constantly on your tail, soaring inexorably from the left of each sector to the right, like those annoying Mario levels where the screen constantly sliiiiiiides along of its own accord. So you can’t hang around too much either, because if they catch up, god help you.
Unsurprisingly, the enemies you’ll face are the biggest problem. Sometimes they’re Rebels, sometimes they’re pirates, but they’re always a pain in the arse. Despite the functional (if not unattractive) graphics, it’s amazing how much FTL draws you in to its real-time-with-pause space battles, and that’s all down to those systems. Early on, you’ll likely be generating enough power to distribute it among the systems you need, meaning you can have your shields (capable of absorbing one hit per level, but ineffectual against missiles), engines (increase evasion), drones (automated attackers/defenders), and weapons (things that shoot other things) all running at MAXIMUM POWER.
That won’t last. The first thing to go, for me, was the Medbay. At its basic level, it only requires one energy, but that was needed to keep all my weapons powered at once. Later, though, as it becomes more and more expensive to upgrade your power levels and individual systems, choices have to be made. You might have three weapons on board, but do you need them all to take down this enemy, or can that spare power be pushed to the shields at the expense of some firepower? It creates wonderful, unscripted encounters, which can go so many different ways depending on your actions.
In what might seem like an obvious design decision (though it’s actually inspired), everything you can do, your enemies can do too. Conversely, all the problems you can run into can befall them also. I knew from experience how debilitating it was to have your weapons room destroyed, even for a short period of time. As such, on my second run, my arsenal of choice was an ion cannon (temporarily knocks out a system, preventing its use) and a combat drone (auto-fires a semi-regular, low-powered laser): focusing on ionising their weapons systems, my drone would chip-chip away, occasionally landing a hit on an unguarded room. As is the way, battles of attrition aren’t quick or pretty, but for a while, it got the job done.
Moments like this, where you hit upon a particularly effective strategy, or you come up with an insane plan to escape a no-win situation, make you feel like a tactical genius. Some techniques are there by design, of course, but there’s so much opportunity for experimentation. The systems are so clear in their function, and their relation to one another; this is a game that supports and encourages creative thinking, and the creation of your own stories over a set-piece.
These stories are what’ll stay with you after you’re done. Like the time my combat-ineffective crew was boarded so early in a run that they’d have been slaughtered had I not hid them in the farthest corner of the ship, opening every other door and suffocating the intruders moments before we were killed. Or the time a wasteful early-game splurge on upgraded weapon power-slots (which I never had the power to maintain) finally bore fruit when, almost destroyed, I turned off nearly everything else on the ship to barrage the enemy with every weapon I had, prevailing with one hull point. Or when my ion cannon/combat drone technique failed me, with the drone destroyed and the cannon unable to inflict the killing blow, and a handy solar flare lit the enemy ship on fire, killing the only remaining crew member as he valiantly fought to put it out.
It’s these tales of valour and fortune that’ll keep you returning to FTL. This is a game that you could feasibly play for a long time. Christ, for some people, this is the game they play, in much the same way that some mainline WoW or Marvel Heroes to the exclusion of all else. Its randomised nature, incremental variety and clear, transparent rules (only very occasionally did I feel I’d been dealt a duff hand) make it a natural fit for these players, and they’ll probably get the most out of it and see the majority of what it has to offer.
But it’s set up in such a way as to still be an enticing prospect for those of us with less time. It’s incredibly intuitive, even if you’re not a sci-fi aficionado like I described earlier, so jumping back in after an absence won’t be disorientating (the modest narrative helps here, too). Each encounter can take anything from a few minutes down to a few seconds, saving all the while, so if the cat starts making that horrific pre-vomit noise and you have to run, shutting down isn’t an issue. A whole run from start to completion (or, more likely, to death) takes an hour or two. Its brevity is its strength, despite its roguelike elements. Those traits are here, yes, but they’ve been cleverly implemented so as not to be exclusionary.
Because we all want to be the captain of our own starship, don’t we? We want to order around a diverse crew of extra-terrestrials, celebrating their achievements and mourning their loss to an ill-timed rocket. We want to fight the good fight, powering the shields and taking evasive manoeuvers. It won’t be the most visually-authentic in-game spaceship you’ve ever commanded (as “authentic” as a spaceship can be), but it doesn’t need to be when it gets everything else so right. Play it for a few hours, play it on and off for a few years, or play it forever: FTL is a triumph of simplicity and a stunning commitment to the ultimate fantasy.
