FTL

I can't believe I've not taken the time to write about this before on here, but for the last couple of weeks much of my "between doing things" time, and post-work free time has been taken up by this game.

FTL: faster than light is an independently published game, which was funded through Kickstarter. Two guys designed and created the entire game, with the exception of the music, for which they enlisted another guy, and anyone can download the game directly from their website for $10 (about £6).

It's an old school style, 2D space adventure game, in which you take your ship and a small crew through various randomly generated systems, to the "last stand" where you meet up with your home fleet and must destroy the rebel's mother ship.

Lets get one thing down straight away, you WILL lose this game 9 times out of 10. If not more. To survive you need to micro-manage your crew and ship systems, and make hard choices to maximise from the constant risks you need to take to progress. A game generally takes about an hour, but sometimes you'll be destroyed within 10 minutes and sometimes it'll string out to almost 2 hours. It's this short game time, mixed with the randomly generated nature that makes it so addictive.

This morning I completed the game for the first time on normal difficulty and had a look at my overall game stats afterwards. I've had 37 play throughs of the game, most of which have been on easy, and I have completed the game twice. Once on easy, once of normal. There is no hard difficulty. I can only think that they didn't think it was necessary.

If you like strategic adventure games, where the odds are stacked against you, there is no save/load function and you're mostly flying by the seat of your pants, this is the game for you.