FTL: Faster Than Light
BANGER · Roguelike · 2012
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $1.99.
- Length
- 12.1h
- Value
- $0.16/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 87% over the last 30 days against 95% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 174 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
This "spaceship simulation roguelike-like" allows you to take your ship and crew on an adventure through a randomly generated galaxy filled with glory and bitter defeat.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $1.99, set in September 2026. 81 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today's $1.99 at 80 percent off matches the lowest price in the record.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 2 percent on value. It is better reviewed than 94 percent of its genre. The nearest things to it, Space Crew: Legendary Edition ($2.39, scores 36) and Heat Signature ($14.99, scores 84), are both worse buys on this math.
Critics scored it 84. Players sit 11 points higher at 95 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Players rate it 95 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 87 percent. Something recent has soured the room. Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 2 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 80 percent of the 2,017 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 12.1 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 113, 9.4 times as much.
It came out 14 years ago and 1.6K were still playing it at the last check.
The drop-off
45% start to 3% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
1,566 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Maybe writing a review for a wildly popular, decade-plus old game is a futile exercise, but that sign won't stop me, because I can't read! FTL is a perfect game. You should buy it and play it. Thank you for your time.
The original FTL is almost 14 years old, at the same time it never gets old. I enjoyed the original game for many hours, its core gameplay loop is fantastic and the game's difficulty (I play on normal or easy) is in the sweet spot to pose a challenge while it keeps the game being a fun and relaxing experience. And don't forget the music, it fits perfectly. My recommendation: Get the game, it's a blast! Nothing more...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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FTL: Faster Than Light scores 89/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/212680/ftl-faster-than-lightThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 11, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.