There’s something special about a game where you can choose to reroute
power away from the vital life-support system to the weapons and coax
one last shot out of your crippled, flaming wreck of a spaceship. It’s
the kind of desperate, so-crazy-it-just-might-work move James T. Kirk or
Han Solo would attempt to reverse his fortunes and save his crew. And
even though it doesn’t always work – or perhaps because it doesn’t
always work, and sometimes everyone dies and you have to start again –
it’s those moments when it does that make FTL: Advanced Edition one of
the most memorable and replayable games I’ve ever played.
FTL is a story generator more than it is a game of skill. After
countless hours of the PC and iPad versions, I’ve effectively mastered
its amazing ship-to-ship and somewhat weaker hand-to-hand combat systems
– it doesn’t take too long, as it generously allow you to pause at any
time and consider what to do and where to move your tiny crewmembers.
(That makes it an excellent fit for the iPad’s touch controls, too.) But
because it involves so many random factors, from whether a missile hits
its mark to if your crew can rescue a space station from giant spiders
in a miniature text adventure, FTL is often cruel to the point where a
few bad jumps can render a playthrough effectively unwinnable. That’s
the joy of it: you never get to feel safe.
Combat seems rudimentary at first, since both 2D pixel-art ships sit
still on the screen trading blows, but its wide variety of offensive and
defensive options give it surprising legs. The many ways in which
multiple versions of blasters, beams, flak, missiles, ion blasts,
teleported bombs, attack drones, boarding parties with six distinctly
different races, and mind control interact with shields, cloaking
devices, defensive drones, engine speed, medical bays and cloning
facilities, reinforced doors, and more is endlessly interesting. Success
in battle involves timing your most powerful shots to hit when their
shields are weakest, which effectively creates some great “Fire on my
command!” moments.
Important decisions are everywhere. Do you target their shields first
and make them more vulnerable to your next attack, or try to knock out
their weapons with the first volley and spare yourself the repair bill of
having to take some hits? Do you concentrate on raw firepower, or throw
in some ion weaponry to quickly disable enemy systems, drones that can
attack or defend, or send over boarding parties and use mind control to
turn the enemy crew against each other? Or try to power up your FTL
drive and run? Whatever you decide, no plan survives contact with the
enemy, and FTL does a great job of throwing unexpected and unlikely
attacks at you to force you to pause and reconsider.
The one spot that could use some work on the iPad’s touch interface is
the weapon panel. As the most frequently accessed part of the UI, it’s
almost always either covering up vital crew health information or
constantly needing to be reopened to target new enemy systems. On PC,
that’s not an issue.
As you’re driven forward through the five-sector map of randomized
navigation points by an unstoppable rising tide of Rebel ships, it
forces still more decisions. While you never know exactly what’s waiting
for you at each point, I’m always tempted to explore as much as I can
and upgrade my ship as much as I can before I reach the extremely tough
battle at the end. Sometimes that backfires, and I have to bite my nails
as I desperately limp to the nearest repair shop, hoping there’s not a
heavily armed pirate waiting to exploit my moment of weakness.
Every jump is just as likely to land you in a well-written miniature
text adventure that often feature interesting moral choices. Should fool
an alien into joining your crew by telling him you’re a god? Or abduct
docile aliens to sell on the black market? Those moral choices almost
never have direct good/evil consequences, so there’s no one judging your
actions but yourself. Some of your options will change depending on
your crew composition and equipment, like if you send your robotic Engi
crew member into a quarantine zone, and that keeps them fresh for
replaying. Some even turn into quest chains that unlock new ships for
your next playthrough.
Those
ships can dramatically change the way you play. Playing as the armored
Rock cruiser, for example, makes me less afraid to take a few hits, and
more inclined to send over boarding parties while using flame weaponry
to kill the crew (since Rock crewmen are immune to fire). The same goes
for the ship augmentations, which can change your viable strategies by
giving you nearly infinite drone parts or allow you to fire your weapons
once without waiting for them to charge.
The free Advanced Edition update (the only one available on iPad)
added a new eighth race called the Lanius, which drain oxygen from any
room they occupy, making them good for deterring boarding parties and
for attacking drone ships. There are a ton of other additions as well,
and even after dozens of hours I’m still discovering new quests.
The Verdict
FTL: Advanced Edition is an incredibly replayable
game, and each run gives me something memorable and rewarding – even
the ones that end with my entire crew dead. The excellent iPad version
has just become my go-to mobile game, since it includes all of the tense
decision-making and unpredictability that make it endlessly
entertaining on PC. Though I still prefer the speed and accuracy of the
PC’s controls, the iPad version is very smooth and a close second.
Source: ign.com
Rating: 9.6
