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fishspit's Faster Than Light (PC)
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| [November 30, 2012 03:11:07 PM]
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FTL is also a refreshingly difficult game. I have not been able to beat it on the “normal” difficulty and just barely able to on “easy”. Combat is absolutely frantic. You target different points on the enemy ship with your weapons in hopes of damaging vital systems and eventually forcing them to surrender (or destroy them, if you are the vindictive sort). Every ship has a set of systems housed in the “rooms” of the cutaway. Stuff like shields, weapon controls, sensors, engines, life support, etc. If that room takes damage, so does the component the room controls. This leads to very strategic gameplay, I’ll often find myself focusing first on the enemy’s shield generators before moving on to try and disable the weapons systems.
Of course the enemy is also targeting your own system, that’s where the crew comes in. Crew members can man stations to add bonuses to your weapon cool down, shield recharge, and evasion chance. When things get damaged you can allocate crew members to repair them mid-battle. This makes maintaining your own ship an almost Sisyphean task when you are under fire, because often times crew members abandoning their stations gives the enemy the time they need to repair themselves.
Take these complicated combat mechanics and crew juggling, and then add in things like boarding actions, fire, and oxygen deprivation. That’s where the difficulty comes in. Luckily you aren’t expected to conform to real time, hitting the space bar freezes time in case you need to breathe, or plot.
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| [October 30, 2012 09:30:02 PM]
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FTL (short for Faster than Light) is a starship RPG/crew management game made by Subset Games earlier this year. The player is put in command of a top-down cutout of a spaceship, complete with crew. The player acts as the hand of god, directing the crew members to work different stations on the vessel to add bonuses. For example: the ship’s shields recharge faster if the shield generator room is staffed.
The goal of FTL is to guide the ship through a gauntlet of hostile star systems in order to reach your home base and warn them about the Rebel’s progress. The story is told in bits and pieces through your various interactions with the rest of the world. The player navigates through space by “jumping”, travelling faster than light for brief periods. The ship is jumped between beacons scattered throughout the system, and must recharge between jumps. In essence, you are travelling between little event nodes. While the drives are recharging the player is faced with hostile environments, enemy combatants, and even moral choices. Do you surrender one of your crew to the slavers or risk losing the whole ship in a shootout? Do you try to help the ship in distress in hopes of a reward or is it just another rebel trap?
As you progress through the game you get ample opportunities to upgrade your ship and your crew. You collect scrap from wrecked vessels or as payment for services rendered/bribes received. Gameplay is short, each game lasting a few hours at most, but in that time you cultivate your ship from a run of the mill cruiser to a well-tuned war machine. Add or remove weapons, layer shields, install exotic parts like cloaking devices or teleport assault bays: there is a surprising amount of ways to go about making war.
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fishspit's Faster Than Light (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Friday 19 October, 2012
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