Light of Altair

By: Paul Eres

On: June 10th, 2009

Light of Altair by brothers Tom and Simon de Rivaz (SaintXi) is a strategy space colonization game. In a lot of ways it’s like a simplified Civilization set in a future space-age setting, although not quite in the way that Alpha Centauri was Civilization in space. You set up colonies across several worlds and asteroids at once, gradually building up power, food, colony happiness, defense fleets, your technology level, and expanding and exploring the solar system: each chapter is largely set in a different solar system (although there are some chapters where you have to manage colonies across several solar systems at once). It’s addictive in the way that Civilization was addictive.

I particularly liked how you could zoom in and out so far: zoom in very close to a colony and see all the details, or zoom out and see the star system from afar, fluidly. I also like the designs of the different star systems, it feels like a space game: you can see asteroid belts flying by behind your planet and so on.

Although the level of polish in the game is generally very high for an indie game, there are a few typos (especially the prevalent use of it’s for its), and I felt the story was a bit uninteresting. I also apparently don’t share the developers’ tastes in music. I’d also have liked to see a multiplayer mode (that was a lot of the fun of the Civilization series). Another thing is, I couldn’t help but mentally compare the game to Alpha Centauri (one of my favorite games), and often Light of Altair would remind me of just how good that game was. But it’s still an interesting experience in its own right: you couldn’t rotate the 3D world you just colonized while watching the other planets go by in the background in Sid Meier’s game.

Currently it’s on sale on Steam for $12.