FTL

Totally forgot about doing one of these last week. Oh well, I'll try to do two over the next week.

FTL is a kickstarter game that was released in September of 2012. The plot is that you've got information that can take down the rebel fleet (I'm assuming you're holding it on an old R2 robot). So you take your ship and go as fast as you can (faster than light, I'm assuming) to the other side of the galaxy so that you can save the Federation from the onslaught of the rebel fleet.

But wait, there's more: Not only do you have to get there before the rebel fleet shows up and take over the galaxy, but you also have to buy resources like fuel and missiles, experience random encounters every time you make a jump, fight ships, save ships, be uncontrolably mean to ships, oh and also DIE!

That's right, death is a big part of FTL. More than likely, the first few times you play you'll die before making it to sector 4 let alone sector 8 (the last sector), but don't worry about that, it seems that death is just another part of this game. And hey, as you play your one ship in your hangar can swiftly grow into more (there's a total of nine ships) and every time you die you just switch ships if you have one and try again. A bit of advice, if your ship catches fire, get your crew into a safe room and open doors to the outside to vent the oxygen and put out the fire.

Overall: B This is a very challenging game. Inspired by tabletop gaming and real time strategies, plus how quickly you can play a round before dying, it makes for a very addictive experience. It's lacking in a few areas, one being story, no actual explanation about why the rebels rebelled, no story for your crew or anyone else's crew for that matter. They just give you a ship and orders to get to the other end of the galaxy. Graphics-wise, it makes me think of old-school 16-bit systems, like the SNES or the Sega Genesis, which is kind of cool in a retro sort of way, but it does gives some desire to something more. The gameplay is solid and highly addictive, like I said, but without a real story and nothing to strive for but more ships. It doesn't give you a whole lot to keep playing the game for. My advice is to play it for a week, and then keep it on your desktop to remember what an exciting week that was (and then come back to it whenever your bored with the latest sub-par addition from a major videogame company, God knows there's enough of those).