FTL Review, 9.0 out of 10 based on 2 ratings
Last year, around this time, Sony created a television commercial that grabbed a lot of gamers’ attentions the way that Toy Story grabbed the attentions of children. You may remember it before you click on the link; paratroopers in a dark night, sirens breaking the air, a smoky bar, the most god awful attempt at making Kratos look like he belonged in the real world, and a gushy, sentimental, overly grandiose tribute to a hobby which, though amusing and one of my favorite activities, amounts to pressing buttons, different colored lights and lots of misplaced anger all over the internet. When I first saw that commercial, I was horrified. Immediately my mind leaped to scores of dead bodies, murdered, piled as high as the sky, littering streets and bursting through windows due to their sheer volume and pouring out the land like some macabre hour glass – and these aren’t even the people I wind up KILLING in video games. I’m just talking about all the times I’ve managed to get MYSELF killed.

If video games were indeed a real universe that we were somehow tapping into, helping shape the fate of little live avatars with hopes, dreams, and a desire to make a difference in life, FTL would overwhelm me with guilt. I can only imagine a monument of, well, monumental proportions commemorating the depressing, soul-crushingly pointless loss of life that I, as a God, had wreaked upon these poor creatures. The list of names would spill on, next to gruesome details: “died in a fire, was captured by slavers, shot by a space slug while offering help, suffocation, explosive decompression, shot by pirates, sliced apart in hand to hand combat with alien boarders, maimed by a madman while attempting his very assailants rescue from stranding,” with indeed a healthy dose of “blown up” all over that list of potentially depressing names.

Thankfully FTL is indeed just a video game, and a very good one at that, making it very easy for me to send wave after wave of desperate astronaut inevitably to their gruesome, stomach churning demises all in the name of my amusement. It’s a PC exclusive title, available on Steam, Good Old Games, as well as from the developer directly at the time of this review. We’ll talk about the game for a moment, but first a bit of a history.

F*%KIN’ ALIENS! ANCIENT Aliens! HISTORY!

FTL is actually the first Kickstarted game that I’ve managed to play since Double Fine got the KS ball rolling, and it’s a pretty good example of how it’s done. When trying to sell a product that doesn’t exist, you really only have two things that you can bank on: your name/reputation, or your proof of concept. Many young developers are discovering that Kickstarter isn’t really the place for them to go, because they don’t have a strong following to fund their project. It turns out that it’s just not enough to tap into a cult meme if you don’t have the development history to back it up. So what are your options? The guys at Subset Games figured it was their more-or-less finished entry into the IGF that it might be enough to generate some buzz. It was, they got far more money than they planned, pimped the game out proper, and just released it to public consumption a couple weeks ago.

It’s a Roguelike RPG (that is, a game rather like Rogue – the balls hard ASCII dungeon crawler featuring perma-death circa 1980) that rather opts to kill players in the comfort of hostile, dark, freezing space, rather than dark, moist, inhospitable dungeons. The plot suggests that you work for some kind of federation, fighting against rebels, and are in a teeth clenching rush to return to friendly space to bring a much needed secret about the (surprisingly well funded) rebel fleet. I say well funded because not only are they numerous, incredibly well armed and shielded, but when you finally return to friendly territory the higher ups advise you to turn around and go destroy that terrible armada that’s been bearing down on you relentlessly for pretty much the entire game here.

Sadly, Lieutenant L. Thomas would succumb to disease later while helping a colony deal with an outbreak, Captain J. Maloney would be killed by rampaging space spiders and Commander A. Yorski would just get plain old blown up.

That might work well enough if you were captain of the USS Deathsplosion-in-the-internal-organs-of-anyone-who-might-look-at-me-cock-eyed, but were you to try it with the ship they let you start with, the scene might be something reminiscent of a tricycle engaged in a game of chicken with an eighteen wheeler decked out with Road Warrior style pointy bits, all aimed at tricycle rider head height. Thankfully, leveling up is a thing in the game, but it’s not quite like your regular dungeon runner manages it.