Altera is a hardcore, realistic, unforgiving military survival sandbox, so of course it features penguin soldiers with reflex sights on their heads

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?

I have been advised between paragraphs that penguin soldiers are not a typical component of your average national military, and that the presence of penguin soldiers in Altera is, in fact, astoundingly weird. What’s even weirder is that developer Vulkanic doesn’t make a big deal about it.

Vulkanic’s most recent Steam post proudly announces that Altera has received more than 2,000 sign-ups to an upcoming playtest. I don’t know how that compares to your average playtest. But I do know that then going “By the way, here’s 50 seconds of weaponised penguins” isn’t so much burying the lede as it is drowning it in a lake.

How does a penguin become a soldier, you ask? Altera answers thusly. You strap a military helmet to your chosen aquatic bird which has a gun sight attached to the apex. You then aim down the gun sight, and the penguin shoots whatever’s in its path.

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.

About