Impressions of... FTL

Wow. Enough said, though I will expand. Have you ever watched Star Trek and been fascinated by the battles? I don't mean the thwang of the Photon Torpedoes or the fizz of the Phasers, or the people being sucked into space by explosive decompression or even the crew being violently thrown about the bridge while two big burly men shake the set from side to side. No what I love is the auxiliary power. Apparently on Star Trek they have endless auxiliary power, 'Auxilary power to sheilds' the captain will bellow at the commencement of hostilities. It's always the shields that gets boosted too. Why not just have the power diverted constantly! Anyway i am heading away from the point at warp speed (despite what you might think, I am proud of that sentence!). I love 'Auxiliary power' because it is a rare glimpse in Star Trek as to the management, strategy and desperation of a star ship in battle and it fascinates me. That is the essence of what FTL captures!

Pink = Bad, the pinker a room, the less oxygen there is.
Plus it just completely clashes with the décor!

Just to clarify I was only played the thirty minute free trail available on On-live, I have played it again and again and again as it is all i can get my hands on. This was never meant to be a review, I don't really want to do reviews on this site, and I'm sorry it reads like one, but I have to talk about this game!

FTL is a Roguelike in space. You navigate a randomly generated sector of space; jumping between systems. At each one something different will take place, again randomly generated. This might be investigating a distress beacon, being ambushed by slavers or running into a hostile ship, in fact it often involves running into a hostile ship. It is lucky then that combat is so interesting. Fighting is conducted from a top down perspective where you can see inside both ships. Instead of controlling things like direction and speed of travel you control which part of the enemy ship to target with what weapon. It sounds very static, but it is far from boring. Such a simple mechanic brings lots of tactical depth. For example I got quickly into the practice of targeting the enemy shields first with my missiles (slow to charge but goes straight through shields) and then hitting their weapons systems with my lasers. Often this would disable their defensive and offensive capability after the first shots and make them easy pickings! I wasn't prepared for this tactic to be used against me.

There must be a KFC in one of these systems.

The thing about FTL it gives you just enough power to feel like you can always succeed but makes you fragile enough so every encounter is dangerous, a few lucky shots can shift the momentum either way. This happened to me when i was showing a friend how to play. I ran into what I thought was easy pray, a weak pirate ship. My first missile missed and my lasers fizzled out against their shields. They hit me back, taking out my weapons with the first shots. I sent my crew to deal with it. This is another element of combat. You can control the crew and send them to repair different sections of your ship. I sent two to the weapons system to get them back on line as quick as possible. The next hit took out my Life Support and started two fires. Fires can be put out two ways, crew can extinguish them (during which time they take damage to their health, which can be healed in the Medical Bay) or you can open airlocks remotely (another subsystem that can be destroyed in battle) to certain parts of the ship and let the air vent into deep space starving the flames of oxygen. I opted for the latter. Airlocks open, the fire was quickly snuffed out. At which point the pirate took out my Remote Door Control. I couldn't close the airlocks! Meaning i couldn't get in and repair the Life Support. Which meant the ship was slowly losing oxygen... that seemed a bad thing!

I'm no engineer but I think a fire in the Life Support room is bad.

I had to get the doors back up. Two more crew were sent to repair them with all haste. More laser shots started more fires in the ship, but i had no time to spare to put them out. I was frantically ordering crew about but couldn't repair my systems quickly enough. When my shields were finally taken out it wasn't long before my ship was little more than debris, a floating black box recorder marking my crews desperate but futile efforts. Combat really hits that sweet spot between being frantic but controllable. It is all in real time but can be paused with the space bar. A few times I have stared at the screen for a few minutes, the game paused, a missile hovering menacingly near my ship, struggling to find a way out!

Death is permanent in FTL, it is a Roguelike after all, and so every decision carries weight. Sometimes fights end quickly but you can spend minutes dealing with the consequences desperate to minimise the damage. For example i fought a battle in an asteroid belt, I dispatched the enemy quickly with little damage except for a lucky shot that completely took out my shields. Defenceless i struggled to control the damaged caused by asteroids constantly striking my ship. Each drop in my Hull integrity (which is always carried over and has to be repaired at a shop) actually made me winch.

After each fight you get some extras from the wreckage; fuel or missiles maybe but mainly scrap. Scrap is the de-facto currency in FTL and can be used to upgrade your ship. In the trial most of the more interesting upgrades (like a cloaking device) were locked but it seems that your choices will be increasingly difficult as you progress through the game, especially when you challenge harder and harder ships. It adds another layer of depth to the strategy and re-playability. Weapons, shields, engines etc. can all be upgraded too but they all need power and the further you upgrade the more power you need. (I knew we would get to Auxiliary Power). Upgrading your power output is a simple matter of getting more scrap and i found there was little power management in the trial. I would have liked more chopping and changing my power usage on the fly but again, it was only a thirty minute trial, there may be more the further you get into the game. I had a brief glimpse into what could be when i bought or found a new weapon. I almost always never have enough power for all my weapons and so have to change between them as i go. I like this element and hope there is more like it in the full game so i can really live out a Star Trek battle, only without the strings.

"Auxiliary power to the shields"
"But there are no hostiles captain" "To the shields dammit!"

Another thing i found through multiple play throughs was that there aren't many different types of encounters, and while i didn't get bored with the combat, more branching events would really round out the exploration side of things. I am sure the full release will have greater variety and i mention it only because despite these limitations in the trial, i have played it again and again and again and I'm still not tired of it. I love this game, and while i wasn't trying to write a review it has sort of ended up like that. I want people to play it. The developers Kickstarter campaign has gone really well and they smashed their target really quickly which I am so please about. This is the type of game that makes me love PC gaming; i think it is the game I am most excited about in 2012 and i can not wait for it to come out. i am glad it has found such support already and thank you to PC Gamer for showing it to me. Even if the full game was just like the trial but bigger and longer i would still love it and it would probably be my game of the year. It is really that good! Everyone has to play it!