Billed as a “spaceship simulation real-time roguelike-like,”@@the roguelike-like is in fact how they said it.@@ “Faster Than Light” is fundamentally a game about panic. As the player you are tasked with firing weapons, managing your crew, putting out fires, repairing broken sectors and fighting off boarders — all at the same time. This could make for an overwhelming headache of a game, but “Faster Than Light” has an intuitive interface and gives you the ability to pause at any time to give your orders to all your crew at once.
The story is fairly bare-bones: Your crew is a team of imperial sympathizers who are trying to get key information about the weakness in the rebel fleet to the empire. As you jump from system to system, you encounter randomly generated events that give you an opportunity to win big (crew members, scrap, new weapons) or suffer serious consequences, all the while being pursued by the rebel fleet.
The game is tough, occasionally to the point of being unfair (jumping into a system only to be pummeled by solar flares and an outclassed enemy ship is unlikely, but not impossible), but the thrill of just barely keeping the ship in one piece while defeating your enemies is unparalleled.
Grade: A-
(“Faster Than Light” is available for the PC and Mac on Steam and from the game’s webpage for PC, Mac and Linux. The game’s price is $10)