Oregon Trail for the next generation.
Remember that really great time you had in Junior High playing a space cruiser simulator during gifted class? Yeah me neither, but that's exactly the vibe that FTL: Faster Than Light gives off. Think Oregon Trail: The Final Frontier. This unique and charming space simulator has an old school feel to it all around, yet still manages to stay fresh and intuitive.
We don't often get strategy simulation titles coming down the pipe that are worth mentioning. FTL is, however, definitely a game you should be playing. Basically you have a star ship that has critical data on it and you are just trying to survive on your way to deliver it. "Survive" really is the key word there, a myriad of ways to die will be presented to you on a randomly generated space trail of doom.
There's a bit of a steep learning curve here, as seems to be the trend with recent titles, but it's not anything that can be considered too keyboard death worthy. FTL's fast paced and deceptively brutal game play can be truly engaging at times. With every sector of the galaxy that you jump to, the battles with other ships grow harder. Enemy ships can kill you so quickly and in so many ways that it can be a bit daunting the first time you are having to direct your crew to say, fight an on board enemy, put out a fire, and repair your engines. The encounters being randomly generated means that in one play through you could have several enemies in a row or none at all.
The randomly generated nature of the game is definitely what causes it to fall short, however, FTL simply wouldn't work without it. You learn by dying and can progressively get better ships and specializations as you progress, however after a short while it feels like you have seen every possible outcome of of the set scenarios and the only thing really changing about each play through is the order in which these scenarios appear.
All of that being said $10 is a steal for this unique title and I encourage everyone who has a PC to check it out. It's a ton of fun and can run on pretty much anything but a typewriter. Thanks for reading!
