FTL: Faster Than Light

FTL is a roguelike strategy game where you manage a ship, trying to outrun the rebel fleet before ultimately confronting the rebel flagship

You start the game off with a basic ship and a minimal crew. As you play more and unlock more, there are TONS of ships and variations on ships that you can choose that pretty significantly impact how the game plays. You take your ship and navigate through a portion of space going from encounter to encounter. These often include combat, but also have little side stories and things you can discover, and often each encounter has multiple options for approaching that situation (often depending on the crew and equipment you have available)

As you go through each encounter, you will earn or trade things like scrap (the basic currency of the game), ship augments (passive abilities), weapons, drones, ship systems, crew members, and expendable resources like drone parts, missiles, and fuel.

Gameplay

A huge part of the game is the ship management and power distribution. The basic systems in your ship are weapons, shields, engines, med bay, and oxygen, all of which require power to operate, and some and sub systems that don't require any power (cockpit, scanners, doors). Managing these systems and power distribution is key to surviving and winning encounters. Each system can be upgraded, but upgraded systems consume more power. There are also several other option systems that you can acquire during a run (or unlock ships with different configurations, including these different systems) such as cloaking, drone control, hacking, mind control, teleportation and a few others that can really change how your game plays out.

The other factor in ship management is your crew. In order to fly the ship, you have to have a crew member in the pilot seat, but each system will also gain bonuses by have a crew member at that station. The crew member will also earn experience with those stations and eventually level up to make that station even more efficient while that crew member is there. Crew members can also move around the ship, put out fires, repair damage, fight off boarding and fight off boarding parties. There are several alien species that you can recruit to your crew, each of which have their own special ability.

Combat

Combat is done in real time, with the ability to pause and plan, where you manage all the systems and crew. There is a large variety of weapons that work in different ways (lasers, missiles, beam weapons, ion weapons, attack drones etc) to fight against enemy ships, or you can also eliminate their crew with a boarding party or other types of special weapons. While your doing that, you also have to utilize your crew and systems to put out fires, repair damage, and defend yourself. Combat in this game is very diverse, and feels very chaotic in a good way

There is so much variety and replayability in this game that I've spent 500+ hours and have not unlocked everything yet, nor have I gotten bored with it. Its chaotic resource management that is different every time. It's an amazing game and really makes you feel like Captain Kirk commanding the enterprise. While I personally love this game and think its a 10/10, some of it's shortcomings include: -Pixel graphics/subjectively poor graphics -Story delivered entirely via text -There is a pretty big difficulty spike in the final boss fight that can be frustrating

Using the new VGP style, my "critic" rating would be an 8/10, but my rating is "masterpiece".