FTL: Faster Than Light

While the base game of FTL is great, FTL Multiverse, a mod for FTL that adds a crazy amount of content (there's more than 10 times the amount of ships in this expansion), is what makes this game amazing and extremely replayable. If you're looking to get FTL, I advise playing until you beat the game a couple of times and then checking out Multiverse if you enjoy the base game. It's well worth your time.

This game is my white whale.
I don't think I will ever beat it, but by god I will try.
It's easy to understand, hard to master and I always play on the easiest difficulty. Maybe I just suck at video games?

The game on its own is incredible. Formative for me and many others, deep - very replayable in its own right. Easy to clock in a hundred hours. In my case two hundred. But once you've done all that and had your fun, the excellent multiverse mod awaits. A total conversion that adds, what, about 5 extra games worth of content? I have another estimated 75 hours in multiverse not tracked on steam. FTL in its base form and modded has been a companion to me for over a decade, from the ages of 10 to 21. Sure I may have many more hours on other games, but over much shorter periods of obsession. Very few games can claim to have been as such a long-standing partner as FTL. Always there for you to pick up.

To think I started playing this game about 10 years ago and it still holds up pretty well to this day...
I love FTL. It was my first Roguelike ever and my introduction to the genre; It's hard to compare to other popular roguelike games like Risk of Rain or Hades, because a run in this game can take several hours... And it is also very unique in its style.
The game has you command a spaceship and the crew inside of it. If all of the crew dies or the ship's hull (health) is depleted, you lose. There are sooooo many different ways to stop this and just like that there are so many ways for it to happen. The amount of multitasking this game has you do is unparalleled to anything I've ever played. Oxygen is down? Well, now they might suffocate. Med bay is down? How will you heal your crew! Ah shoot, they drop a stasis bomb on your weapons and you can't shoot back! well, let's wait for it to be fixe-- aaaaaaand you were boarded and now they're destroying your shields. And I'm only scratching the surface! Fires can spread, hull can be breached and oxygen leaked, systems can be hacked, drones can be deployed, minds can be controlled, DOORS CAN BE OFFLINE... And there is also a plethora of different weapons in the game. Some definitely better than others but the large variety allows you to create so many different combinations! (You can pause the game at any point and said pause button is the only thing making this anything close to fair, because even with its use you can still lose!)
There are 10 different ships, 8 of them with 3 styles, 2 of them with 2 styles. There are 3 levels of difficulty and excluding about 12 of the ships, you can decide whether or not to include the DLC which significantly increases the difficulty. So you combine all of those different ways to start the game with the aproximately 50 weapons in the game plus the 8 different races with their 6 possible abilities to develop plus the ones that already come with each race..... rest assured, every run is going to be different.
I know it says about 120 hours on the record at the time of this review, but I probably have close to 200 (I started out of steam and I just transferred my game later). It is to this point, the most difficult game I've 100% so far.
It is incredibly punishing with an extremely steep learning curve, unforgiving mistakes, and random enemies that at times may be just straight up unfair... and even so, this is still one of my favorite games of all times. It is not for everyone, that's for sure! But after you make that first successful run and defeat the rebel flagship you'll feel so excited that you just need to do it again with a different ship!... Actually, who am I kidding. You will feel just as excited every single time. I know I did!
I cleared the game at least 8 times on easy without DLC for the type A of the original ships, then 10 times in normal with the DLC for the types B of the originals and A of the extra ones and then 10 times in hard with the DLC for the C of the originals and B of the extra ones. I've spent so much time on this game that is weird for me to even think that I've completed it. For those out there who still want more, there are mods that expand the game beyond the extremely high amount of content it already has!
Subset Games knocked it out of the park with this one. I hope we get a sequel at some point in the future because this game is well worth it! <3
PS: The DLC is free and already included with the game. The game is 10$ and normally goes on sale for a mind-bogglingly low price. If you have any wish to ever try it, there is no reason for you to not get it.

It's great if you like roguelikes with resource management. Just and advice, space to pause the game when needed
---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☑ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☑ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☑ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☑ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☑ 9
☐ 10
---{ Author }---
☑

There is an undeniable pull to FTL. As one of the oldest and most famous popular roguelikes, it kind of has the benefit of being made by a team and in an era with absolutely no expectations or trend-chasing, and it leads to really genius and simplistic combat design that has stood the test of time and is by far the most captivating part of this game. Decisions matter, situations get insanely chaotic, and there are plenty of micro-optimizations related to power distribution, target selection, or boarding defence that mean there's plenty to learn and improve on the longer you play this game.
So, does this make FTL a good game? No, not really. I hate a lot about this game. The events are wack and insanely prevalent, and a frustratingly prehistoric version of the inbetween-gameplay roguelike decisions like Slay the Spire's question spaces, except while those offer all the information and let you make interesting, informed decisions, FTL's often have a right choice that you basically need to play with a guide handy to fully understand, no right choice except ignoring them, or the obligatory Blue Option you can't really play around other than broad strokes like moving towards certain sectors. In-combat micro optimizations plus run length means that really solid play is frustratingly long, which combined with the game's deliberately intended 10% of winnable runs for players until you get extremely experienced and an unlock system that's legitimately abominable and reliant on either RNG or the vast experience winning demands, and you get a game that is comically archaic and makes me feel like I'm smashing my skull into a brick wall harder than almost any other game I've played. This is obviously an intended feeling, but it fails the other mantra of games like this: I don't think Losing Is Fun this time.
So why is it still so interesting? The obvious counterpoint to everything that I've said is there are recorded 100-run win sprees on hard. A game this old and beloved has had every last nook and cranny scanned over and several users legitimately are trying to perfect it, and it's not unreasonable to assume a 99% winrate is possible for these people eventually. It is very much a game where your increasingly improved response to decision making and better understanding of the mechanics will allow you to prevail more and more the longer you play, and while this is true of many Roguelikes, many of them I feel are legitimately... easy in comparison to this. FTL is exhausting to play well because outside of easy pretty much every run is a death march you're not intended to beat, and it's legitimately more impressive to have a positive winrate in this game than to Eclipse 9 every character in Risk of Rain 2.
It's a game that kind of sucks, but is so graceful in all of it's failings and the endlessly dynamic, rewarding to master combat that it wraps around to being timeless.

The best game since 2012.
Keeps me coming back year after year, banger OST.
Paired with the Multiverse mod, what more can you ask for. Insane value for money.
When you get tired of the basegame or think you've seen it all, slap Multiverse on there and enjoy 100x more to do.