Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A fairly large chunk of space colonisation gaming came crashing down on demo sites over the weekend, and I’ve been having a bit of a play. It’s called Light Of Altair, which I believe is a reference to a star, rather than an assassin. In it you colonise planets with a caricatured building interface, setting up life support, industrial systems for trade, and so on. You start in our solar system and, via the gift of narrative, head outwards. It’s functionally pretty, but the overall design of it is bugging me somewhat. I had to kill the music after about thirty seconds, and the fact that I can’t click to deselect my current build object I find oddly like having something stuck to my hand. Get off! I don’t know that kind of user-interface synesthesia/transference is called, it probably doesn’t have a name, but it’s not the first time I’ve experienced it. Anyway, I seem to have got stuck on the second level of the demo, and I’ve no idea why, which can’t be a good sign. Hmm. You can download it here, it’s 98mb.