Light of Altair

[h1]79 / 100[/h1] For the lack of a better phrase, I would call this the "poor man's Sins of a Solar Empire", that has more of a focus on planet building than combat. LoA is far from a bad game, but does suffer from a basic UI and occasional glitchy play. The depth in strategy is not huge but offers enough to give you some ongoing challenges to master. Graphically it is fairly low def, but the planets and rotating your view around them looks decent. Other parts like the combat graphics do look worse though as with the UI in general. Rather than being more a 'sandbox' RTS like Sins, LoA has a structured campaign to vary your goals (each mission will have a dozen or so goals to complete), progressing the storyline as you work to push further out into the galaxy. This is one of the stronger points to the game as it keeps you engaged while progressing the story, slowing giving you more powers as you advance. I would estimate there is about 10-15hrs of campaign to play, plus hard mode if you want more! Not being able to pause time with the space bar (or remap the keys!) was frustrating as you can slow down and speed up time, and use this frequently. It is also very easy to miss new notifications as you need to manually clear your old notifications to see the new ones. For new players this can leave you very confused at what you should be doing till you get into the flow of clearing manually and reading everything! I have also had goals not trigger when completed, resulting in having to retry the level, but this may be isolated cases that won't impact you necessarily. Despite the short comings, I still find myself loosing track of time playing this as I do find it a rather enjoyable little space strategy game (... once you get used to it!). :) [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/TrueBlueReviews#curation]If you enjoyed reading this review, please follow [u]True Blue Reviews[/u] for more recommendations![/url]

I'm giving this a "not recommend", but that's only because I cannot actually give a clear recommendation to get it. I'm also not giving one against getting it - my actual feelings on this game are mixed. It's an excellent space gardening simulator. There's something a bit hypnotic and relaxing about just planting those colonies, tending to them and growing them. That is the one definitely good aspect of it. The rest, well... the words that come to mind are "simplistic" and "placeholder". Take military logistics for instance. You can design different ships, but you can only have one design for each class (fighter, corvette etc.) - and if you change it, you change all your ships of that class. You build fleets by assigning how many ships of each class should be in them, and you can assign up to a cap decided by your fuel production. If your fleet is below the set number and above a planet with a shipyard, it will get slowly reinforced. If you already have a certain number of ships and you go below that, the extra ships disappear. So, if you need two fleets to actively defend your territories from multiple attacks, but then would like to combine them for a major strike... you're out of luck. The fuel cap will prevent you from increasing the number until you lower it in the other fleet, and lowering it in the other fleet will just make those ships disappear. And so, "merging fleets" is done by destroying the ships in one and rebuilding them in the other. Because. Same problem if you would like to split your one fleet to defend against two small threats. You can't. But on the other hand, this system that makes fleets unreasonably hard to manage, also makes them durable beyond reason. Fleets can never be destroyed, though all their ships can. Fleets also gain experience. So, if you lose all your veteran ships in a suicidal attack, no biggie. The fleet will get rebuilt, just as veteran as it was before. Also, if you lose your fuel production capacity, that is also not a problem. The fleet will get rebuilt to the cap set before you did, as long as you don't actually manually remove anything from it. Also, there's no cost for having a fleet with fuel assigned to it. Early in the game you learn that you need a certain amount of fuel to colonize further-off planets. You assign fuel to fleets, so you'd think this fuel would be no longer available for civilian uses, but you'd be wrong. The only thing that matters is how high the cap is, not how much you actually have left. It's design solutions like that which define the game. Simplistic and not really thought through, but kind of working, after a fashion. This goes for the economy, the military, and even the "deep plot", in which apparently Africa managed to colonize the moons of some outer planets of our Solar System without anyone noticing and without taking any visible stops along the way, while decades later the Earth government is taking its first steps at developing appropriate technologies and building a necessary fuel base at the Moon and developing the required technologies. The Africans just kind of... went there, ahead of everyone, for the player to stumble into them later. And this is just one example. It has interesting moments, but it looks like a rough draft with plot points, the space between which gets filled with shrugs and "w/e". The lack of continuity between missions also hurts it. The game pretends there's some, but you have to conquer the same places many times because apparently you didn't the last time. If you happen to pick this game up as part of an indie bundle like I did, it's worth spending some time playing. If you see it very cheap, consider picking it up. But be sure not to set your expectations very high.

Эдакая стратегическая казуалка (стразуалка, ну!), которая изо всех сил пытается быть похожей на эталон 4x стратегий. Вообще это не сразу ясно, первые несколько миссий кажется, что это просто менеджер застройки планет, однако с появлением возможности найма флота и появления противников всё встаёт на свои места. Главное - геймплей затягивает (относительно), хочется отстроится в системе на совесть. Сюжет миссий не блещет гениальностью, но вполне терпим. Колонизируй то! Колонизируй это! 7 из 10 :)

"Light Of Altair", она же "Покорители Галактики" - одна из лучших игр детства. Найдя её спустя 5 лет, купил сразу же. Плевать было и на отсутствие скидки(во время летнейй распродажи), и на отсутсвие русской локализации. И не пожалел. Плюсы: +Музыка - лучшие мелодии, которые я когда либо слышал, отлично вписывающиеся в рамки игры. +Геймплей - сначала всё легко и интересно, но вскоре сложность достигает непреодолимых высот, но играть от этого только интереснее. К тому же, сам интерфейс понятен и не запутан, как в других играх этого жанра. +Сюжет - весьма интересный(по моему мнению), но остальные считают его слабеньким. Дело за вами. Минусы: +Графика - полигонов маловато, но выглядит мило, к тому же что вы хотите от игры, которую делали 2(!) человека? +Космические битвы - здесь все неоднозначно... В них отсутсвует стратегия - вы просто смотрите на сражение и все. Лично меня это устраивает, однако для остальных это очень критично. Выбор за вами. Когда я играл в LOA в детстве, я и подумать не мог, что это инди игра, что её делали 2 человека. Она просто поражала моё воображение своим геймплеем и музыкой, и на графику мне всегда было плевать. Я просто играл и наслаждался. И теперь я её наконец-то прошёл. Короче, рекомендую однозначно. 10/10

For people like me who totally suck at RTS and get destroyed by even the most harmless enemies, this little game here is a real relief :) Colonizing planets is enjoyable and gladly the micromanagement is easy enough to do for even such economic untalented players like me. And the small planets! I love that, always adored it when you can see the curvature of the planet. Is it worth the 13€ they ask on Steam for it ? Maybe not, but if you can get it for cheaper (i got mine from a bundle) a safe recommendation.

Рекомендую. Настоящая космическая экономическая стратегия с некоторыми военными элементами, которую можно пройти (она не бесконечна и нет режима песочницы, что ныне редкость). Основной геймплей – застройка планет. Игра хорошо сделана, заточена именно под прохождение в одиночку. События, сложность и скрипты подогнаны крайне правильно. Интерфейс интуитивно понятный, рутины почти нет. Одна из немногих, где хочется повторить некоторые миссии и сыграть их по-другому, пока не скажешь себе: “Четко сработано”. Сюжет хорошо вписан в игровой процесс. Здесь нет абсолютной свободы действий, отсутствуют динамически генерируемые карты, не мучают сложными дилеммами – и это положительно отражается на атмосфере, на балансе и на длительности игры. Она как добротная книга или фильм: одного раза вполне хватит, а дальше по желанию. Оставила хорошие воспоминания. Купил, чтобы переиграть.

This is a strategy game where you build up planets and asteroids to then attack the enemy and destroy their bases. The graphic are pretty simple, so nothing grand there but they are ok for such a game. The strategy is also simple from what time i played, but i guess it gets more complex later in the missions. The story for the campaign is a bit boring from what i could see. Maybe its me. I will cautiously recommend this game. It's not great but at the low price below 10$, it should be worth a few hours of fun.

This game is a fun joy, its not a 4x game like you might think,its more like a standard styled rts with a planet based meta map.It has a nice amount of expansion,colony building,ship building,ship configuration with hardly any micromanagement at all. There is no skirmish mode,you play out a campaign that gets progressively harder,though I have found some later missions to be easier for me than the later ones.This however is mostly based on how you decide to play and how you counter the A.I. attacking. The game does a decent job of throwing varied attack attempts at you from the A.I. but once you learn how to counter an A.I. fleet it becomes a "rush to defend, then attack" type of thing. Main thing about this game is making money while balancing out having enough fuel to have a fleet and colonize planets which will make or break you if you not careful. Not sure why it got removed from steam, imagine dev/pub issues but the game has hardly any bugs and runs perfectly on Win7 OS. Its been in a few bundles so if you like a lite strategy that is fun to play ,try and snatch a key from someone. Solid game for casual play or for a good 20hr + end game completion. A sequel was talked about a few years ago on the dev site but no clue if they making one or not.

Pick it up for under $5, worth an hour or two of your time!

If you're into a light strategy game, look into this. It reminds more of farmville than sins of a solar empire, but I probably haven't played enough of it. My major concern is the lack of instructions. There is an info page, which seems to give exactly enough information to not be helpful. I'm not sure how my score works, though I have an idea (time/money/etc) and how colonies upgrade and what I can and cannot do. But I have a soft spot for sims, even though I think I'm done with this game. Too many other stuff to play and this doesn't really keep me invested. I recommend this game to those who are interested in space colonization sims but just don't have the energy for something a bigger. I appreciate that it keeps things simple (at least so far I've played it) to the point where it doesn't max out my working memory.