FTL: Advanced Edition is a rogue-like, top-down, spaceship simulator. It’s currently available on Mac, PC, and mobile devices. Playing FTL is basically like being Captain Kirk in Star Trek. You can actually yell out, “All power to shields! Fire lasers at their engines! Crewman, get to the medbay!” and it makes sense (well, you’d still be yelling at a computer, makes you look a little crazy). It’s an unforgiving game that will require a fair amount of time on your part, but there aren’t many games like it on the market.

There’s not much story in FTL, but you’re given enough to make sense of things. You’re a member of the federation, transporting secret information about the weakness of the Rebel’s Flagship. To do this, you have to make it from one end of the sector the other, then jump to the next sector.

Seems simple right? Civilian systems usually have less danger, but also less rewards. Nebulas mess with your sensors, but can have rare quests.

The game randomly generates the sectors you can choose to jump to. Each sector has about 21 waypoints and you need to jump between them to make it to the exit waypoint. Each point on the map has random events, like stores you can buy crewmembers, weapons, repair your ship, or ship upgrades from, or enemy encounters. Certain waypoints also feature hazardous environments like asteroid belts or solar flares. The Rebel fleet chases you through the galaxy, taking over waypoints, so moving backwards is always a gamble.

The Rebel fleet peruses you as you try to collect as much scrap as possible in each system. An upgraded ship stands a much better chance surviving the galaxy.

Your ship requires fuel to jump, which you can find or buy in various ways. When you encounter an enemy, you have to either destroy their ship, kill the crew, or simply wait until your “faster than light” drive charges to jump away. By destroying enemy ships, accomplishing side quests, or encountering random events you get scrap which you can use to repair your ship or buy weapons, upgrades, and crewmembers.

FTL is about management at its heart. You assign your crew members to different rooms and they man their equipment there. Each subsystem of your ship (weapons, shields, engines, etc.) is actually a skill that your crewmember can level up by using that station in combat. For instance, every time you fire a weapon in combat, the crewmember’s weapons skill increases a little.

Here's the starting ship, The Kestrel. It's pretty bare bones, but very up-gradable It's got three human crewmemebers, but they haven't been assigned anywhere except the pilot.

There are a number races of crew that you can, each with their own unique traits. Humans, for instance, learn skills faster than any other races. The Engi (a race of sentient machines) can repair things twice as fast as all the other races, but they do half the damage in hand to hand combat. You should aim to have a number of different races on your crew, and figuring out who does what best is really gratifying.

Here you can see human and Engi crewmembers. You can have a total 8 crew members, which is definitely helpful.

All of your ships systems (weapons, shields, etc.) require power from your ships reactor, which can be upgraded and improved over time. You make choices throughout the game about which systems you’re going to focus on, because you can’t generate enough power to fuel every part of the ship at once. This allows you to focus on certain playstyles and really opens the replayablity of the game.

You can see that each weapon requires a certain number of power bars to work, as do the rest of the ships subsystems. Here, the weapons system has not been upgraded enough to allow all three weapons to be active at once.

Combat is the main way you deal with enemies in FTL. Each encounter shows your and the enemies ship from a top down perspective, and you can target individual rooms of the enemy ship. You’ll face rebels, pirates, slavers, religious zealots, and more. Your ship’s weapons each require power, and the missile based weapons require ammunition each time you fire. Each weapon has a charge up time that resets once it fires, so you need to manage the warm up times of everything while dealing with incoming fire from the enemy. Each ship has up to 4 shield bars that you need to get through before hitting the enemy ship directly (certain weapons bypass the shields directly, like missiles). The combat takes place in real time, but you can pause the game and issue orders, so it’s almost possible to play the game turn-by-turn. There’s a large variety of weapons with different effects, warm up times, and damages. Mixing and matching them is challenging, but rewarding when you figure out a good combo.

By targeting the subsystems of the enemy ship, you can disable that system until the enemy repairs it. This makes combat really dynamic and strategic. Yeah, it would be good to knock out their weapons, but if you knock out the shields first, the res… — By targeting the subsystems of the enemy ship, you can disable that system until the enemy repairs it. This makes combat really dynamic and strategic. Yeah, it would be good to knock out their weapons, but if you knock out the shields first, the rest of their ship is open to attack.

There’s a lot of different kinds of ships you can use, with different layouts and subsystems. Each ship has an A, B, and C variation and more ships unlocked as you beat the Rebel Flagship or complete various side quests. The ships themselves don’t actually make a huge difference in gameplay, other than that you start with different races of crewmembers and subsystems. Throughout the game you can also acquire up to three upgrades for your ship that have various effects (collecting 10% more scrap every time you find some, missiles have a chance to do no damage, etc.) Unlocking new ships is fun and it really gives you a reason to keep playing besides just how many points you can get.

Playing with the various ships is fun and can force you to change your playstyle, which is definitely interesting.

There are some parts of the game that can be annoying. You can be totally screwed over by RNG at any point during combat. RNG, for those who aren’t familiar, stands for Random Number Generator. It means that the game rolls a die and if the number is above “x”, the attack will hit. This means that you can launch 20 attacks in a row and have all of them miss, while getting hit by all 30 of your enemies’ attacks even though you have a 50% dodge chance. This is amazingly frustrating, but it can work on your side.

The last boss is also crazy hard. I won’t spoil it for you, but beating the Rebel Flagship takes a number of attempts and a good amount of luck. It’s really frustrating to be intensely invested in your ship, crew and just lose because they game decided that you’re going to miss all of your attacks, or because the first volley of shots knocks out your shields. A large number of the random events you encounter can also end in you losing crew members, and since training them takes time, it can be a huge loss. It’s hard to get an idea of exactly what’s going to happen for every quest or dialogue choice and the game autosaves after every event, so there’s no going back.

Worth Playing?

Yes.

I love this game. It has more replay value that most triple AAA games, more interesting mechanics, and it’s more challenging. The amount of customizability you have with your ship, your crew, the weapons, the upgrades, and path is fun and really well designed. It’s hard though. If you’re looking for a nice, relaxing game to play after a rough day in the salt mines, you should choose something else. This game will make you yell at your computer as well as anybody that tells you to calm down.