FTL: Faster Than Light

FTL: Faster Than Light is a space flight simulator game with elements of roguelike games, developed by Subset Games. The game was announced on February 27th, 2012 via Kickstarter and was formally released on September 14th, 2012.

In FTL, the player starts the game in control of a Federation cruiser that is on a secret mission to deliver a data packet which it has intercepted from a rebel fleet to the Federation fleet. Throughout the game, the player must traverse a total of 8 sectors with the ultimate goal of defending the Federation fleet from the final boss. While doing this, however, the player must also avoid destruction from the rebel fleet, enemy ships, environmental hazards, and otherwise possibly dangerous situations.

The player can select 1 of 10 types of ships, most of which have up to 3 different layouts with various combinations of systems, weapons, drones, and crew. The player may also choose which difficulty they wish to play on: higher difficulties result in less scrap gain and harder enemy spawns throughout the game, but an increased score multiplier at the end of the game.

Throughout the game, there are various events that the player is able to encounter at any beacon they travel to, with different possible results. The player may also accrue resources throughout the game, which can be used for the firing of certain weapons, activating drones to assist in combat, or simply upgrading the ship/buying stuff.

Upon your eventual victory (or inevitable demise), the value of your actions will be calculated to create a score, which can be viewed later in the high scores section, provided it beats your previous high scores.

The game includes an internal Achievement system, which allows one to check their general progress in the game. It also includes achievements specific to each ship, which can be achieved in order to unlock alternate layouts for each of the 10 playable ships.

As of the free Advanced Edition update, many new features have been added, such as 3 new systems, a new subsystem, a new alien race and ship, Type C layouts for most of the pre-existing ships, new enemy ship layouts, new weapons, drones, and augments (made more easily purchaseable by the addition of multiples pages to stores), 2 new sectors, a plethora of new events, and various other bugfixes, interface improvements, and minor features.