It’s only as weird as you make it.Įarly in the game, you encounter the native Mind Worms, roiling monsters that attack with psionic powers and make the heads of lesser men explode. You can stick with the presets, or you can make heavily armored colony pods mounted on speeders.
It’s not as frustratingly complex as many 4X games, but it gives you just enough tactical flexibility to tweak units to fit your style. Each unit is a combination of various components that you can rearrange to your hearts content. But make no mistake, Alpha Centauri is its own game. Cities are colonies, while chariots are scout buggies. Wonders are replaced with secret projects, and workers with terraformers. That’s not just a silly backstory for the back of the box, that’s actually a critical element to why Alpha Centauri continues to stand out from every other Civ-like game.Īlpha Centauri is built around the framework of Civilization, and as such, a lot of it looks like a sci-fi re-skin. After an unexpected catastrophe, everyone neatly divides according to ideology and decides to fight over a newly-found planet (creatively called “Planet”). It begins with space colonists leaving the Earth, because the planet’s always greener on the other side of the Kuiper belt. The morning light of the following day gave me my answer: yes, Alpha Centauri is still the electronic drug you always remembered. So, I launched it up again to see if it remains playable in the age of widescreen monitors, or if it was just a cult of nostalgia. While the older Civ titles are largely obsolete, the sci-fi spin-off, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri still maintains a loyal following. Our own Greg Tito has a tale of it absorbing months of his life away, like some shakespearian witch. That “one more turn” often has a way of stretching early into the following morning. Pretty much everyone who’s experienced Sid Meier’s Civilization can testify to its time-warping powers. We kick off the new year with a celebration of the games of Sid Meier, starting with Alpha Centauri.