Terra Invicta

There are brilliant ideas in the ambitious early access release of Terra Invicta, and a lot of fun to find for strategy game enthusiasts, but you need to be willing to drill down into sometimes-opaque and confusing mechanics to do it. Politics are fun, if overwhelming, and the space layer is very cool, but the two just don't quite gel together yet. I do recommend Terra Invicta, but when playing takes so much trial-and-error to see results, my overall recommendation has to come with big caveats until it has spent some more time in early access.

A mind-boggling grand strategy game that tries to do way too many things, but ends up doing some of them extremely well.

Complexity is both the greatest strength and the main limitation of Terra Invicta. The depth of the relationships between factions and nations makes the early stages of every game a fascinating geopolitical web, while the phases involving confrontations with alien factions feel a bit anticlimactic. Without being off-putting, Terra Invicta organizes the vast amount of information needed to master the game into cards and screens, leaving it up to the player to make the connections. Stimulating, but also challenging.

The most beautiful and versatile UFO strategy game since 1994's UFO: Enemy Unknown.

Terra Invicta is about being ready, being patient, and what happens as a result. Victory is never flashy; it’s achieved through hard work. Failure happens a lot, but it always teaches something. Being able to stay alive feels real when it comes.

Terra Invicta puts the “grand” in grand strategy, offering experienced players a deeply involved strategy game that takes them from a shadow government to a space-faring superpower. That same depth creates a demanding learning curve, however, and the time commitment required may put some newcomers to the genre off.

"After spending enough time in early access, Terra Invicta has rightfully earned its full release badge. Pavonis Interactive has done a colossal job crafting a grand strategy game that simulates things from the influence of the oligarchy in Romanian politics to bloody space battles playing out around far-out alien bases. The awkward pacing and occasional production-value issues are no excuse not to join in defending the Earth from the alien threat or to submit to it. It's your call."

Terra Invicta is a deep, interesting and engaging game that doesn’t quite play like much else out there. It spins a lot of plates and, by and large, manages to keep them in the air. There’s a political and conspiracy sim, a light-touch grand strategy game, a resource exploration and exploitation game and a full space-combat sim - any one aspect of which could have easily been spun out into a stand-alone game. There’s a whole research and tech tree system that works brilliantly differently from anything else I’ve seen in a game like this, with a competitive-cooperation angle that is really interesting! I’m genuinely surprised the game works as well as it does - it had sat on my Steam wishlist for many years as a curiosity; something I wasn’t sure would ever see a release and something I’d have been entirely unsurprised to find an over-ambitious failure. That I didn’t is a real source of delight - if anything I’ve touched on sounds at all intriguing to you then you owe it to yourself to sign up for what, in a year of big releases, might just be 2022’s most interesting game.

Terra Invicta brings grand strategy sensibilities to the alien invasion genre in a tour de force display of technical and artistic skill. Be prepared to lose large chunks of time and love every single moment of it.