FTL: Faster Than Light
FTL is now available in 9 languages! English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Simplified Mandarin!
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The free expansion, FTL: Advanced Edition, is available now! Content additions include: new alien race, events, weapons, playable ships, drones, and more! Also adds additional musical tracks by Ben Prunty, and events by Tom Jubert and guest writer Chris Avellone.
If you already own FTL it should update the new content automatically. Advanced Edition is included free for anyone who purchases the game from this point forward.
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In FTL you experience the atmosphere of running a spaceship trying to save the galaxy. It’s a dangerous mission, with every encounter presenting a unique challenge with multiple solutions. What will you do if a heavy missile barrage shuts down your shields? Reroute all power to the engines in an attempt to escape, power up additional weapons to blow your enemy out of the sky, or take the fight to them with a boarding party? This "spaceship simulation roguelike-like" allows you to take your ship and crew on an adventure through a randomly generated galaxy filled with glory and bitter defeat.Key Features:
- Complex Strategic Gameplay – Give orders to your crew, manage ship power distribution and choose weapon targets in the heat of battle.
- Play at Your Own Speed – Pause the game mid-combat to evaluate your strategy and give orders.
- Unique Lifeforms and Technology – Upgrade your ship and unlock new ones with the help of six diverse alien races.
- Be the Captain You Want – Hundreds of text based encounters will force you to make tough decisions.
- Randomized Galaxy – Each play-through will feature different enemies, events, and results to your decisions. No two play-throughs will be quite the same.
- No Second Chances! – Permadeath means when you die, there’s no coming back. The constant threat of defeat adds importance and tension to every action.
Game Discussion
Steam User 158
The best game i'll play in my life.
I spent over 2000 hours on FTL, have every achievement on Hard and taken every ship over 7k point victory. I never played any mods, not even multiverse, because the base game was enough.
Most of my hours were racked up when i quit drinking 10 years ago. FTL got me through that. Today, I just finished my last run with the Kestrel. This was the last time I'll play FTL. I have given enough of my life to it and I am so thankful to have had this. Time well spent.
P.S.
One of my many idiosyncrasies: I always put KazaaakplethKilik on doors and make him be "Elite Doorman Kazaak" + attempt (O2) related deaths when i had him. If you are reading this, please put him on doors sometimes and let the legend live on. I can just imagine him pulling little levers and enjoying it. :)
Steam User 66
>boarded the whole crew on the enemy ship
>epic fight breaks out
>Ship's Automatic Fire System fires at enemy ship
>enemy ship is destroyed with 100% of my crew present on it
>run ends
10/10
Steam User 61
After all this time. I've finally defeated the Normal mode. I bought this game like ten years ago. Too hard so I quit. Now, after some time, I tried again and it was still hard. But after religiously playing this game, I've finally done it! I just wanted to at least win once before I die haha. Man this feels good :D
Steam User 48
PLAY THE MULTIVERSE MOD FOR FLT!!!
Ok, now that's out of the way...
This game is hard.
Like, hard hard. My keyboard would be in pieces whenever I play this game if I could afford to buy a new keyboard every other day. You will be put in situations where no matter how well you play, or how diligently you prepare, you will fail. Sometimes its fun, sometimes it not, but the vast majority of times you will learn something from your failure.
This is the key to understanding FLT.
Its not a power-trip fantasy about blasting your way through hordes of enemies before an epic final heroic fight against the big bad evil faction's ship (though some runs may lean towards this) rather, FTL is a story about a desperate struggle against an unforgiving galaxy to survive, and see that the sacrifices, your sacrifices, to persevere were not in vain.
Victory is not guaranteed, you will face trials and tribulations, and for you every battle is either a pyrrhic win or total defeat. Beloved crew will die moments before rescue, slaughtered by the tenacious and desperate enemy or succumbing to the brutal reality of space. You will attempt to save a planet from famine and plague, only to be rewarded with a laser through the chest of your best pilot. Your missile will miss the enemy ship at the critical moment, flying errantly into deep space as the battered rebel scout escapes with the information of your position to the armada seeking your destruction. But every failure is a lesson, and few defeats are without their foreshadowing.
Eventually, you will develop the skill, knowledge, and fortune to guide your crew to victory against overwhelming odds. You will find the balance between temporal demands and the preparations required for the last struggle against the Rebel Flagship, the representation of the forces which have sought your annihilation, and you will land the killing blow upon the beast which has taunted you for so many failed attempts to mar its impenetrable visage, saving the galaxy from totalitarian xenophobic fascism and earning you an your crew a deserved congratulations on your grand achievement.
And then you will move the difficulty from easy to normal.
Dramatic? Yes, but FTL warrants such exaltation. Although the name of the game is often frustration, it comes from being truly invested in seeing your ship succeed against the odds, and success in any measure becomes cathartic. The story you make by playing FTL, the decisions which you have to make, elevates FTL into being one of the best games of all time. And the Multiverse mod for FLT takes it to 11. Seriously, once you are good at base FLT download the Multiverse mod and it is like you are given FLT 2 for free. It's slightly easier in my experience, but it takes all that makes FLT good and makes it better.
Enough rambling, buy the game. And if you can't afford it, DM me. FTL is a gift deserving of being charitably given.
Steam User 34
The closest you'll see a game be a flawless masterpiece of its genre. The premise is simple, the mechanics are easy to understand yet allow for tons of nuance. There is a learning curve, and this is a game that will humble you unless you respect that most things the player can do, it can do at you right back. Some ships will be hideously mean with their weapon specs. There will be ships that seem to dodge at impossible rates. All of them are a puzzle for you to solve with tools you yourself will have to find and assemble, and understand when it is appropriate to do so. In my first few hours I couldn't believe my eyes at how I was dominated and nuked from orbit by RNG. After a few hundred, I understood RNG isn't what caused most of my woes. After a thousand, I understand that finding situations that are unwinnable are incredibly rare in this game.
So, pause often. And enjoy this game with a small vice. Be that eating, vaping, whatever. Kick up your feet and just have some fun in a game where time can stand still forever frame by frame if you're quick enough, while you analyze the situation. It's been my go-to game for relaxation and decompressing from busy or terrible days. I hope it may be for any of you as well.
It'll run on any PC made after the stone age, and it's cheap. I'd even recommend getting a fully DRM free copy of it from gog or something so you can put it on whatever device you want without needing to sign in anywhere.
I've lost track of how many runs I've won and lost but I know I'll be back to this game forever and ever.
Steam User 33
Best low-memory, turn-based, run-on-anything, strategy game on the market.
Steam User 24
It is fantastic. A ship-to-ship space combat roguelite where instead of steering the ships, you control their main systems (weapons, shields, engines, oxygen, etc.) and manage their crews. The gameplay, which largely consists of putting out many, many literal and metaphorical fires all at once while trying to blast enemy ships out of the sky, is still as fun today as it was on release. There isn't much story to write home about, which plays to the game's strengths.
FTL was a phenomenon in its time, part of an indie roguelike renaissance. And it still rules so much. Many of your early hours playing the game will be spent playing on lower difficulties (Easy or Normal) and getting a hang of its tactics--how and where to allocate crew, how and where to allocate energy, when to fire your weapons and what to target, when to take a fight (almost always) and when to skip it (if it's REALLY going to mess your ship up), etc. Also, to never send crew to fight alien spiders (they're no joke!)
Much of the game's strategic depth, however, comes from deciding what upgrades to purchase for your ship, and when. Maybe through sheer stubbornness, I am still utterly amateur at that element of the game. I buy what I want to play around with, and routinely get stomped for my hubris.
But that's OK, and that is one of the game's strengths (and all of Subset's games' strengths): Losing is fun. It's a core part of the experience.
In the spirit of roguelites, the more you play, the more toys you unlock to play with. In FTL, these toys are different ships and starting ship layouts. But instead of unlocking these through victories, new ships are unlocked by completing specific (often very difficult!) in-game quests/challenges, OR by unlocking achievements. This structure, where unlocks are governed not by victories, but by accomplishments which encourage different playstyles, are what really makes the game work for me. Grinding out achievements (with a few exceptions) can frequently be as fun, or more fun, than trying to score a victory, and every ship has achievements unique to its strengths and playstyle which encourage experimentation.
The net result is a game where, win or lose a run, you can still progress your unlockables and explore new toys.
Each playthrough lasts a few hours, and they can be deeply stressful hours. FTL is a very hard game. But it's a game whose difficulty is less frustrating than it otherwise might be because of its short play time and the fact that unlockables do not require a victory. There'll still be tension--when you first beat the final boss by the skin of your teeth, you'll be sweating, and you'll feel the accomplishment. But it's just the right amount and type of tension, enough to keep you coming back, but not enough to drive you away from the game entirely.
I really can't recommend the game more highly. Love, love, love FTL. Also check out Into the Breach, Subset's other game which is not as widely liked but is far away my favorite of theirs.
If you get deep into this game the way I and many others in the (alive!) FTL community have, there are extensive and expansive mods, most notably FTL: Multiverse. I literally have never played it because, believe it or not, even after 500 hours I still have two achievements left to unlock. (I'm a pretty slow and stubborn gamer though, likely to cling to non-viable strats for the thrill of suboptimal gameplay with flavor, so who knows how long it'll take for you if you're more calculated and methodical :) )