FTL: Faster Than Light Review

FTL: Faster Than Light is an indie title by Subset Games for the PC. It’s a mashup of the roguelike genre and a ship simulator.

The idea is pretty neat and I don’t think I can’t recall a game that has combined these two genres together. You are in charge of a ship, travelling from one system to another and you will also need to make choices as there are more than one solution most of the time.

The game has some simple ship management which helps if you’re not very good at this sort of things like I am. I love that you can pause the game too in between gameplay to issue commands and what not. It might look simple, but there is a lot strategy to the gameplay which I enjoyed. Your crew members can level up too and will get more efficient at running the ship but I could never make it far enough for them to level up.

So which part of this game is roguelike-like you ask? Well, there is permadeath. Once your ship explodes, you get a high score and restart from the beginning but you can unlock new ships to use each with their own advantages.

Something I didn’t like was it felt very luck-based. You can get into a few fights that are easy and suddenly you can get crushed after hoarding some nice loot so that was a little frustrating.

So should you get it? If you like ship simulators or roguelikes or both then yeah. If you feel like trying something different compared to all the open-world/shooters/action RPGs out there, then get FTL. You can get it on Steam and at the time of this writing, its 10% off for another 12 hours. I really liked the art direction, it was very pleasing to the eyes and the soundtrack is brilliant too. So I highly recommend getting the game and soundtrack bundle if you plan on buying this.