Anyone who grew up watching any version of Star Trek has
dreamed of commanding a Federation vessel. And Faster Than Light is an amazing PC game
that lets you do just that — plus a free expansion will let you add more weapons, drones,
and alien ships.
I was a little late to the FTL party, but I fell in love
with the game immediately. It has a very retro feel, and the controls are very
intuitive. Click on your shields and you increase power to the shields. Click
on a crew member, then right click on a room in your ship, and that crew member
will go there. The top-down view of your ship lets you do everything from
hiring your crew to directing all power to shields to opening an airlock so the
vacuum of space extinguishes that fire that just broke out in the transporter
room. [Note: At the moment, FTL is available as part of the Steam Holiday sale for less than $4.]
The simple controls support a game with lots of strategic
depth, and sometimes brutal difficulty. It’s a Rogue-like game, meaning you can’t
save and go back if something happens you don’t like, and the sectors and
enemies you face are generated randomly.
Sometimes you’ll run into a really
tough alien ship and desperately try to hold things together until your warp
engines recharge, allowing you to escape. Sometimes aliens will beam aboard your
ship and slaughter your crew, and there’s basically nothing you can do about
it. When your crew members die, you won’t be getting them back, and when your
ship is destroyed or left derelict, there’s nothing to do but start over from
the beginning. On easy mode, I’ve so far made it to the end boss once (I was
promptly obliterated).
The variety of weapons and defensive systems you can use to
customize your ship provide an immense number of options. You can take out
their shields with ballistic attacks, then surgically destroy their systems
with lasers. Or you can hit them with bombs that start fires, keeping their
crew busy while your combat drones keep up the barrage. Ion weapons let you
disable systems without damaging the hull, while boarding with your crew gives
space combat that up close and personal touch.
My discovery of FTL coincides almost perfectly with the
recent announcement of a free expansion called Faster Than Light: Advanced
Edition. In addition to new sector events and new ship layouts, it will add
more hostile environments to the sensor-blocking nebulae and hull-burning red
giants. The Borg-like Lanius alien race will probably murder my crew over and over. The new mind control system will let you force alien invaders to repair
the damage they just did to your ship, and the hacking system will let you mess
with your enemy’s on-board systems. Why are the medbots in sickbay shooting
acid at us, aaaaaaaaaa?!
FTL is almost perfectly designed for playing on a tablet, so
iPad owners should be happy to know that an optimized version for that device
will be released at the same time as the free expansion, scheduled for “early
2014.”
