FTL: Faster Than Light

I first bought and tried FTL a whopping 10 years ago, got frustrated at the final boss and shoved it to the side for a very long time. However now that I'm much older and far more patient I finally gave the game another chance, and fell in love with it. This game invokes a certain feeling that games rarely get right about space. It's something beautiful, but also very vast and lonely, and the soundtrack perfectly captures that feeling the moment the game is launched. Sometimes I'll let the entire theme play before starting a new game, and during gameplay I'll simply stop playing for a few moments just to let the music sink in before moving on. Behind a pretty exterior this game is absolutely brutal, make no mistake. The goal in the game's development was to make it feel like a suicide mission, where all the odds are stacked against you. There are multiple things you need to learn to balance while playing - where to use your power levels, keeping your fuel supply ready, keeping your crew alive, keeping your ship in tact all the while focusing on how to take down an enemy ship and their current status as well. While this can be overwhelming at times, the game also allows any amount of pausing to assess and plan out moves. The sci-fi elements of the game here really make this game as well, there's all these different alien races that each have their own cultures and societies that view the ongoing war in different ways. During the game's random encounters so many different things could happen that the choices between diplomacy, deception or avoidance can all be viable options, strategizing is just as important here as it is during combat. So why did I originally shelve the game? I really struggled with the final boss and felt that runs were a bit too RNG reliant on whether you could beat the boss or not, and while this is partly true, it's the point of the game where it demands a mastery over the games mechanics - luck may help you reach the final boss, but pure skill is needed in order to overcome it. I earned my first victory, and every subsequent one felt just as rewarding as the last. FTL is simple in design yet complex in strategy, every playthrough I find myself in different situations running into different problems, constantly having to adapt and hope I manage to scrape on by to the next sector, else I have to start all over again. It's unforgiving, but rarely in a way that felt discouraging. I had to become a better gamer to overcome FTL.

Be prepared to lose hours of your life and your mind trying to beat this game even once. Update: I finally managed to beat the BASE mode on EASY after just over 50 hours.

In the thirteen years I've been playing FTL I've come to realise that this is one of the best and most tightly designed games I've ever played. I'm so sad that the developers did not create any more content beyond Advanced Edition because, in spite of there already being so much content to sink your teeth into for the ten dollar price tag, it has left me wanting so much more. I recommend this game to everyone and it has made me a staunch fan of Subset Games. Please work on more things so I can buy them

I love this game it makes me think of all the friends I could have in space.... and how i can send them out the air lock if they ever decided to question me as the space captain. No one gives Captain Jordan the backchat and lives.

Played this back in 2013 when Angry Joe reviewed it, been coming back to it to play nonstop every now and then to this day whenever I get the urge to blow up enemy ships and use their scrap to get shiny new loadouts to blow up other ships with. It's a bit of a learning curve, as learning to time your shots to land in just the right way to take out the enemy shields -and- slam your beam into the enemy hull as it goes down massively improves your run just as much as knowing when to flee and what order to buy upgrades in. (hint: get 2 bars of shields first), and while bad or unlucky situations can be unavoidable, getting good enough to mitigate those damages and salvage a run despite horrible odds is an amazing feeling that feels much more achievable to me on the small scale that FTL runs on. It's not one I can guarantee all my friends would enjoy, but it's my absolute personal favourite

I want to like this game. There are definitely parts of it that can be a lot of fun. But the truth is despite having a fun gameplay loop it's balanced so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ badly that eventually every time I return I uninstall it after a few runs. My most recent run was one where I was cooking dude - I went DEEP and had a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing loadout. Yet somehow I run into a basic ♥♥♥♥♥ ship in the last sector - not the flagship - and none of my shots hit. Miss after miss. There's nothing I can do to prevent this. I could try targeting their engines and pilot. Guess what that ♥♥♥♥ doesn't matter if the game decides every shot you take is going to miss. It doesn't matter you have a cloaking device and the upgrade that lets you shoot when cloaked if you cannot disable one ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ system on the enemy ship. ♥♥♥♥ this game. It's actually not worth your time.

Мало кто знает, но у игры есть вторая часть и она зовётся FTL: Multiverse

I WANT TO LOVE THIS GAME! And I know a lot of people out there do. Call me old fashioned, but not every game needs so much RNG doomy doomy doom events. Especially on easier difficulty modes. I do not understand how so many people can enjoy so many dead end runs. I play games for fun and relaxation, not to have RANDOM CHANCE destroy the experience SO CONSISTENTLY. At the very least the developer should rename the difficulties because "Easy" is not a mode that exists in this game.

Pain, RNG, frustration, sleepless night, one more jump, giant spiders and many many more await you in this little gem. Get it on sale or not and be happy to get a great game. Play it for a while, then instal multiverse and get the sequel which was never released. 10/10 Absolute gem.