THE ALTERS review – Life doesn’t always give second chances, but here, you can make another choice! When survival depends on the versions of yourself you never got to become, every decision changes your fate. How far would you go to alter your destiny?

THE ALTERS Review Pros

• Awesome graphics.
• 46.55GB download size.
• Platinum trophy.
• Graphics settings – graphics quality set to fidelity or performance, and motion blur on and off.
• Accessibility options – closed captions font size, HUD scaling, fast forward effect, reduce prism effect, and reduce the intoxication effect.
• Controller settings – Invert axis and sensitivity sliders, vibration, set movement mode to dynamic or toggle, and aim assist mode that can be set to off, slowdown, or slowdown and auto aim.
• Streaming options – disable copyright music, and reduce noise effect in the communication room.
• Difficulty options – set economy to standard or challenging, and set action elements to easy, moderate, or hard.
• In-game cutscenes that look amazing mixed with in-game interactions amd still art set pieces.
• Top-notch voice work.
• Sci-Fi action adventure gameplay.
• Tutorial pop-ups as you play.
• The story is that your ship has crashed, your crew is dead and the planet you are on will be vaporised by the sun in a few days time, you play as a ships builder and must learn what needs to be learned in order to escape, you have some help from a mysterious figure on the video call system but the lines bad and you can’t tell who it is or anything.
• A full 3D game world, and you have 360-degree camera control.
• Third-person view.
• You can pause the game.
• The game world is just jaw-droppingly beautiful in a dark, dangerous, I want to go home now kind of way.
• You have a main base that you can freely go in and move around in, you can actually add to it and build new rooms to get new abilities and options.
• A story that sounds cliche, but it has so many twists.
• The game is split into days, and you choose when to sleep and advance the days.
• Energy will dictate how much your character can do; any tasks and movement will deplete the energy bar until you collapse and sleep when it’s empty.
• The planet is full of radiation in the air and on some of the surface; at night, it is stronger.
• You have a helpful tutorial tab filling in as you learn things, and a database to check in on particular parts.
• Build a workshop to enable crafting, you queue up what you want to build and then interact with the workbench and build it in a fast time by holding the button down.
• Find destroyed parts of your ship to hopefully find rare items or a piece of memorabilia.
• I love the interface, it’s so clean and has a striking palette of colours.
• Anomalies can appear, and apart from looking cool, they can block entrances as you cannot enter the area.
• Lay down scanners by placing them where you like. It will scan and show how deep and how strong the source is; you can instantly recall all scanners back if you mess up. Once you find a solid source, you can build a pylon.
• Pylons can be placed wherever you want, but they need to all be connected and hooked up to your base.
• Discover new materials and resources from tools and or exploration.
• Craft new tools like hooks so you can climb small walls and inclines.
• Play how you want.
• It nails the atmosphere of being alone in a hostile place, there is a joke in there, but il leave it.
• You get a warning and a timer for when high-level radiation is incoming.
• Multiple-choice encounters throughout the game.
• I don’t want to give out too much on the story, as the pacing and presentation of it really set it all up.
• You go into two states in regards to energy, there is tired, where actions will take longer and exhausted, whereby you start using up tomorrow’s time as you sleep longer.
• Your base is fully Customisable as each room is a pod and you are able to move and place them where you like using the command centre interface and grid-based placement.
• Gather and farm materials and resources so you can build and upgrade your base and unlock new mechanics.
• Full day and night cycle, it’s obvious with the whole sleeping thing and days, but hey.
• Once set up, mining outposts can be used for fast travel.
• You can turn on a radiation barrier that, when on, will heal people inside the base and stop any radiation coming in; having it off will not heal radiation exposure and will slowly seep in. Using the radiation barrier requires cells to run, so it’s a juggling act.
• Build a kitchen and prepare food so you have meals on hand that will be automatically used when needed.
• Remember this is Sci-fi, you get a material called rapidium and then you can use it with a quantum computer to alter your life line branch of memories, so if you went left, for example, you could create an alter who went right. You create them with a womb that is next to the quantum computer. Science, am I right?
• You can freely look at all the major parts of your character’s history and choices.
• I love that I am doing all this, and yet I still don’t actually know who is on the other end of the video calls.
• Creating different alters and what they can do is based on where you are creating an alter on your life line. The game does a good job of showing you all this, don’t worry too much.
• When talking with an alter, you can see their thoughts and feelings with red being bad and green being good.
• During the story, you will get your ship to move around, doing so requires materials, etc, but it has this cool function where you can automatically retrieve all structures you placed, so there is no waste.
• Rooms and machinery on your base can break and fail, meaning you need to get the relevant resources like tool kits to fix them, or you lose a lot of your arsenal.
• Food can also improve an alter’s mood.
• You can add what you want to craft or cook from the pause menu, so it’s just a case of going to the right machine and hitting go.
• Find and set up many different resource deposits that will feed them to your base when you use the interface there.
• You can assign roles and sections of the base to alters so they deal with them.
• It just looks incredible how you can see underground and how it’s formed, and where there are deposits.
• You can find movies and watch them in the base.
• Building a research lab lets you use the massive tree of upgrades and abilities, but it can also make crafting easier and cheaper.
• When alters are arguing, you can intervene and have a choice on what to do.
• The way the locations unfold and how the game plays out is satisfying and impactful.
• Upgrade the quantum computer to unlock the ability to create better alters and add more alters to your crew.

THE ALTERS Review Cons

• Cannot remap the controls.
• You can change the settings for difficulties in the main menu, but the game doesn’t carry those over when starting a game.
• Early on, it can feel daunting, a lot of text is coming up on screen from tasks to story, to other tidbits.
• It did take me a while to get used to what my limitations are in regards to my character’s energy.
• The fast travel system is kind of clunky; you need to always select where you’re going, and it involves scrolling around the map.
• The tasks are not as clear as they could be, and it can be frustrating.
• Invisible walls on ledges so you can’t fall to your death, but this means you cannot skip part of a path to make it quicker, either.
• You cannot save when you want or at a save point; the game only saves at the start of a new day.
• Slight slowdown hiccups here and there.
• When getting new tutorial pop-ups, they won’t go away until you interact with them.
• At times, it sounds like the game tells you more than it should, or it assumes you know things you don’t.
• For me, I found the act of finding metal-based deposits hard to find and set up the pylons, I just couldn’t get my head around what was asked of me.
• It can get to be a real plate spinning exercise as you juggle Alter, tasks, surviving, and socialising.
• So many currencies and materials to manage.

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The Alters:

Official Website: 

Developer: 11 bit studios

Publisher: 11 bit studios

Store Link:

PlayStation