Happy 25th anniversary. I was less than a month old when this game released for the first time. After 25 years later, it is still one of the best and most played strategy games out there. Truly a genre-defining game.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri allows you to do something future 4X games don't have: Terraforming. Not just changing land to forest, you can straight up raise mountains and lower lands. Your nukes will also shape the land. Your mines and boreholes will raise the sea level. The Planet itself will go hellbent against you and your (humanity's) destructive nature. Combine that with the freedom of modelling your units with VALUABLE choices instead of just numbers, then combine that with social engineering AND diplomacy that ties it with. Truly a 4X ahead of its time. The control and UI are dated. Simple control, such as left click to choose and right click to move, was novel and groundbreaking that unfortunately doesn't exist in this game. The graphics become very cluttered, stacked, and messy as the game goes on. You are constantly fighting against the UI and it hides several key information. But, those are just about it for the cons. Everything else in the game? Chef's kiss, 5 michelin stars, simply amazing. Oh, I don't forget about the lore alright. The characters are alive, well written with their ideologies fully fleshed out and are clashed together, forming natural and very human conflict. What technologies and predictions this game brings into the table very well reflects the current state of the world. Makes you think whether we will have to forcefully launch off from Earth in search of our own Planet in Alpha Centauri. DLC is... not as fully fleshed out. I play without them, but it is a bunch of new content that some people can enjoy.
