FTL: Faster Than Light – First Impressions
Rogue-like used to be such a dirty word. Games with artificially inflated difficulty and a penchant for screwing you over were a niche market at best. From the punishing Kaizo Mario games to mainstream successes like Super Meat Boy, difficult games have had their market and stuck to it.
Until FTL. I’m no stranger to Super Meat Boy, hell I’ve sworn at Kaizo Mario eight, nine, ten thousand times but FTL feels different. The difficulty of most games puts me in a bind either I suck at games (an assessment that isn’t necessarily unfair) or the games are cheap. For the uninitiated ‘cheap’ when referring to difficulty means that it kills you arbitrarily or is impossibly difficult. Sections of Super Meat Boy feel cheap. Kaizo Mario is supposed to be cheap. FTL pats you reassuringly on the back as if to say “everything is going to be ok” and before you know it you’re Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction, locked in a basement with a gimp. FTL shows you it cares before it buggers you blind.
It’s always a testament to the quality of a hard game when, as things take their inevitable slide towards failure, you reflect on what you could have, should have done differently rather than focusing on how quickly the game Ving Rhamesed you.
I’ve only spent a short time with FTL, exploring space with a message to deliver but in that time I’ve left several wrecks for others to salvage floating in the blackness and even more souls left abandoned, unburied, forgotten in the service of the greater good (by which I mean beating the game – I’ve not yet reached the end but the fact that I’m part of the empire and being chased by the rebels does make me think I’m on the wrong side of this war)
Graphically FTL does exactly what indie games do best. The in-depth UI gives you all of the information you need and not a single pixel is wasted. No area of the screen feels unnecessarily empty nor superlative. It’s not a HD monster of a game, with a million and one shades of brown and grey to show details in textures that could be used as a desktop wallpaper, but it doesn’t need to be.
Credit should also go to the audio design which is impressive, conveying a sense of the bleakness of space. You feel alone with the minimalist score the game provides which adds a great deal to the immersion.
Is this review superlative? Damn right it is. FTL deserves it. I said earlier in the review that I have only spend a short time playing the game, I think I have found my newest go to game when I have an hour to kill.
If I ever manage to win I may well return to this review and even write a follow up but, right now, all I want to do is play it more.
9/10
