Filip Novotny The dark space nebula is crossed by the bow of a small pirate ship, the goal of which is immediately clear - to destroy your vessel and collect all valuable resources. After a long fight, the crew of the Federation ship manages to repel the attack, but the long fight leaves them greatly weakened. This is used by the militant rebel cruiser waiting nearby, whose lasers will soon cut through the hull of your ship. The onslaught does not stand and under the fire of the arch-enemies of the ruling Federation, it crumbles into a million pieces. The battle to save the galaxy is lost and you have to start from the beginning. Welcome to the world FTL: Faster Than Light.
You already had the opportunity to try this title, which has been in the gaming industry since 2011, on Mac or PC. On these platforms, Faster Than Light has earned a number of excellent reviews and top prizes from professional competitions. After all, the players themselves have also seen success - they financed FTL as part of the Kickstarter service. Highly successful crowdfunding campaign it brought creators ten times the required amount and players, on the contrary, a lot of additional content for free.
The authors bet on the very popular sci-fi genre, but did not - as is common practice - treat it as an arcade or a shooter. Instead, they took inspiration from nickname games roguelike. These games draw inspiration from classic dungeon games Arrogant from 1980, which became a cult affair thanks to its uncompromising difficulty and the concept of permanent death, but also the possibility of choosing from several characters or procedurally generated levels.
It can be said that with its gradual development, the roguelike genre gave birth to games like Diablo, Torchlight or final Fantasy. FTL follows the roguelike in its own, unique way. The protagonist is your spaceship, the enemy monsters are militant rebels, and the intricate dungeon is the entire dark galaxy.
Your task as an emissary of the ruling Federation is to deliver important data to its headquarters that will help repel the rebellious part of the human population. These enemies of yours will constantly be at your throat, as they cannot forgive their government for collaborating with alien civilizations. Your journey through the eight space sectors will be by no means a walk in the park. Not even bloodthirsty pirates or cosmic traps such as meteor showers or solar eruptions will make your difficult task any easier.
All these events happen randomly - in most cases you don't know in advance what you will find in a given part of the sector. This could be a trading post, an enemy ship, or any of a large number of special events. This could be a neutral vessel whose crew will offer you a ship upgrade in exchange for a certain raw material. It's up to you whether you believe the offer. If so, don't be surprised when seemingly friendly traders turn out to be subversive pirates who teleport to your ship and go after you.
Such situations will accompany you throughout the game, so it is wise to properly prepare for them. You can (and should!) do this with the help of resources that you collect from defeated ships along the way, as well as by completing tasks for friendly Federation residents. With these materials, you can buy better weapons or other crew members from merchants. Even more important is improving the key elements of the ship, such as the power of the reactor and the main engine, the fire capacity or the strength of the defensive shields.
If you don't pay enough attention to upgrading your ship properly, you will soon find yourself in great danger. Enemy ships do not forget about the gradual improvement of key systems, so you can easily get into a situation where your weapons have no chance to burn through enemy shields. At that point, all you have to do is shift all efforts to a hasty retreat and pray that pirate mischief doesn't send your ship to silicon heaven.
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However, it is good to mentally prepare beforehand for the fact that even a perfectly tuned ship can fall prey to unexpectedly well-armed pirates. All it takes is one random event and your entire strategy starts to collapse like a house of cards. At that moment, the option to pause the game and think about the next course of action for as long as you want comes in handy. This is one of the aspects in which FTL took inspiration from its roguelike predecessors. However, it borrowed another characteristic - permanent death. And it will inevitably come on the first, fifth and twentieth attempt, and with it the necessity to start the game again.
Although the so-called permadeath may seem - especially on the simple games of the iPad - as too harsh a punishment, in the end it will only be a source of frustration for a short time. FTL is fun precisely because it requires the player to learn different tactics with increasing number of attempts, much like the crew of your spaceship would with increasing flight hours.
If you don't have the patience, or perhaps suffer from an aversion to science fiction or are not friends with strategic thinking, don't try FTL. Otherwise, there is nothing to solve. FTL: Faster Than Light will offer a deeply thought-out gaming experience that is truly durable thanks to the amount of randomly selected content. And these are qualities that few iOS games have despite their audiovisual sophistication.
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