LogFAQs > #933261901

#9





Years of release: 2012 (PC), 2014 (Advanced Edition)
Beaten?: With almost every ship on hard mode

You know, it's funny - it's been so long with this one, I don't even remember the origin story. I feel like, this deep on the list, I should have some sort of personal details to relate about my experiences with the game. But for FTL, I can't even tell you when I first learned about it, why I decided to buy it, what my first playthrough was like. All those details are just missing, and I don't know why. FTL just feels like it's always been there for me, somehow.

I have a measly 592 hours on this one compared to Slay The Spire's 1,144, which feels paltry by comparison, but I think I spent roughly the same amount of quality time with FTL as I did Slay The Spire, and it's my 4th most played game on Steam. (#2 is Team Fortress 2. #3 is... later.) FTL wins out by a hair for me, I guess, because something about the gameplay just feels a bit more satisfying. Having a spaceship with all these little crew members I can direct around, upgrading my systems and buying new weapons, being excited to see if I get any nice rewards on the next jump. Even though, after playing a game for hundreds of hours, you tend to exhaust all the possible things that can happen, FTL doles out its most interesting rewards rarely enough that it can be really exciting to go on another run and see if you'll get a really cool setup. At the same time, it gives you rewards that are good enough often enough that you never feel like any of your runs are totally screwed because of it. (I know that I've seen people complain about not getting enough weapons before, but you really need to be aggressive about routing to shops and looking for them in stores - it helps a lot.)

I think I remember why I don't remember my origin story with this game now - I think that originally I didn't actually like it that much. I think that before Advanced Edition came out, and before hard mode came out, the final boss was a little too simple to figure out and the total possibilities for your ship loadouts not quite interesting enough. Advanced Edition didn't add THAT much, but what it added was just enough to completely open up this game anew to me, somehow, with its new subsystems (Hacking is totally broken but hey) and its new ship layouts and its new weapons and events and all that, as well as hard mode. You know how I said that roguelikes live two lives, one in the first 50 hours of the game and one after the first 50 hours? The first 50 hours of FTL for me were surprisingly mediocre, but what I wasn't expecting was how this game would blossom for me after the first 50 hours. I don't really know what happened - I just got hooked on this game even I'd been at it for a while. I really wanted to master hard mode and complete it with every ship. I really wanted to do everything this game had to offer.

This game does still have some flaws. For one, I think some of the ship designs are super cumbersome and require a great deal of luck to get off the ground, and sometimes winning fights with them can take an excessive amount of time as you need to wait ages for certain systems to recharge or for health to recover as you painfully micromanage fights. There's some waiting in this game that feels unnecessary at times, but I give it a pass - it's all part of this game's surprisingly emergent gameplay, where fires and ship breaches can hit you from multiple angles when you're also fighting a ship at the same time, and there starts to get to be a lot of stuff to manage, and even after a fight's over you still have to spend time repairing the ship.

It's one of the most well-tuned roguelikes I've ever played - there's just so many different ways to win, so many different tools that will get the job done, and every run has an interesting story to tell, which is the biggest thing that I think sets this one apart. Every run has the potential for some funny situation or some kind of war story that I've never seen before, and that keeps me coming back. I'm sort of done with this game now but I still keep coming back to it every once in a while when I want something relatively easy to play - Into The Breach by the same dev has filled this role a little bit lately but it can't touch FTL.

This game has some really good mods for it too - I really enjoyed FTL: Captain's Edition, which changes just about everything in the game, events, weapons, whatever, but also adds some surprising new mechanics that take the game in some neat directions. That mod alone added a whole bunch more value to this game for me, and it was worth pointing out though I wouldn't rank it separately or anything.

I don't have any big points to end on. FTL is just really good and one of the definitive play-this-over-and-over again experiences of the decade. I'll keep coming back to it for a long time, probably.