Light of Altair
is an Indie Space 4X game made by Saintxi, a London based company.
In it the player leads mankind's expansion into the stars, from building the first colony on the Moon, to traveling to vast voids between the stars, fighting the rival factions in a clash of goals and expansion.
With a simple, straightforward colony management, and self resolving space battles, the game manages to be fun, without a clutter of features or micromanagement.
Featuring a Campaign mode, the game follows the player as it is hired to build colonies for different factions across the Solar System, and eventual escape from the UEO, Earth’s united government, and it’s strict and supremacist methods.
A sequel has been since announced and currently undergoes beta-testing, by the name of Moon Base Eridani.
Tropes:
- Alien Sky: Most planets have either nearby sibling planets, several moons, or are in orbit around a Gas Giant.
- Apocalypse How: Continental. The back story tells how the world started to get worse, and then Europe is hammered into radioactive dust.
- Asteroid Miners: One of the buildings enables to mine orbiting moonlets.
- Asteroid Thicket: While not impacting on space travel, any planet located inside an asteroid belt will give the impression that this is occurring.
- Arbitrary Weapon Range: Straight, all weapons have a max range, including lasers and missiles.
- Baby Planet: The smaller planets and asteroids looks small enough to walk around, even considering the lack of scale of the game.
- Cool Starship – The Genesis and the Exodus deserve special mention.
- Conveniently Close Planet: Averted and placed straight, while planets are clearly visible from one another, travel time takes months of gametime. Even with best thrusters.
- Deflector Shields: A researchable Armor Choice against lasers.
- Kill Sat: What China deploys to force the USA into accepting a World Government.
- One World Order: The United Earth Order.
- Our Wormholes Are Different: Many star Systems have one, but you are not using it until you stabilize it.
- Scenery Porn:
- The game has gorgeous skyboxes in every star system.
- It IS a secret goal of the first mission to look around, zooming to galactic view and back.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale
- Space Clothes: Mostly Elize’s uniform.
- Space Is Noisy: In battles.
- Space Station: Any planet with a city can have one.
- Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: A simplified one.
- Terraform: In the last mission, you can build Atmospheric Generators, which make a world habitable, there are no visual changes aside from a blurry atmosphere around the planet though.
