This simple mechanism supplies both the urgency of the game and the balance. If you don't stay ahead of them, you're toast. Pushing you forward on this journey is the approaching Rebel fleet, which appears at the left of the map and advances with every turn. The game has no interest in morality or tracking your decisions. Visiting these triggers an equally random encounter - you may be attacked by pirates, approached by traders or asked for help. You do this by hopping across eight sectors of space, each containing a randomly generated sprawl of planets and stars. Different ship types and internal layouts can be unlocked in-game, radically changing the way you play. You've got to deliver important data to the rest of the Federation fleet to turn the tide of the final battle. You're on the run from vicious Rebels who are sweeping through the galaxy. You're the captain of a Federation starship. And it's wonderful.ĭeveloped by the two-man team of Subset Games, it's a simple yet nimble creation that creates bite-sized scenarios on the fly that will unite Star Trek and Star Wars fans in swooning joy.
Online ftl faster than light free#
Games that swallow up your free time like a black hole swallows everything around it.
What felt like a quick 30-minute game before going to bed turns out to have been an epic four-hour session that has left you cold and alone in the early hours of the morning. Time spent in Faster Than Light does not equal the time passing in the world outside. So it is with FTL, a superb little space-faring roguelike. At light speed, a journey that may take a few hours for you would be years for everyone else. They're essentially aspects of the same thing - spacetime - and as you travel through space at the speed of light, time flows very differently than it does for the people you've left behind. Einstein's theory of relativity lays bare the relationship between space and time.
It's not often you can point to an indie game as the perfect illustration of a core scientific concept, but here we are.