On the face of it, Altera looks like a typical military survival sandbox. It’s a game about wandering through a massive, vaguely central European landscape in military camo, building a base, crafting useful items, and taking on missions from dead-eyed NPCs to shoot other dead-eyed NPCs in authentic ranged combat. It’s basically DayZ without the zombies, PUBG without the competition, ArmA without the sensation that you’re piloting your character like a mech.
In short, Altera couldn’t be more down to Earth if it had fallen into the Kola superdeep borehole, which is of course why it features penguin soldiers. What’s that? Your country doesn’t have penguin soldiers? Well, we know who’s going to be conquering who, don’t we?
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There are some obvious follow-up questions here. Who is aiming down the sight? Where do the bullets come from? Did the penguins all swallow a gun? Are penguins guns? Is any of this real? Am I having a stroke? Unfortunately, I cannot answer any of these, as I’ve just rewatched the trailer and spotted a clip where a penguin also launches a grenade, thus opening up a whole new avenue of futile queries.
I can, at least, tell you why Altera has penguin soldiers. Altera has been in development since 2022, and was originally an explicitly sci-fi game where humans, animals and robots all worked together to fight against a villain called Metalgrave (strong name). Over time, the developer has shifted toward a more realistic look for Altera, pushing the sci-fi elements into the background. One sci-fi element that remains, however, is the concept of humans fighting alongside animals. Hence, penguin soldiers.
If you want to try your hand at being a feathered, waddling death machine, you can still request access to Altera’s beta via its Steam page. There’s no specific release date for Altera as yet, but when it does launch, it will do so into Steam early access.
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