I've called games ambitious before, but please believe me when I say that Terra Invicta is one of the wildest, strangest, and biggest ideas I've ever seen a single development team try to take on. All at once it's a grand strategy-scale geopolitics simulator, an alien-invasion battler, and a hard sci-fi solar system industrialization simulator with integrated real-time newtonian-physics-driven fleet combat. But while I got sucked into its world, that fresh mix of ideas suffers from some very conventional strategy game failures in its interface, accessibility, and balance.
One part of Terra Invicta is an engaging simulation of a world where secret coalitions manipulate its nations. They fight in the shadows over humanity's response to the threat of an alien invasion, managing national allegiances, research, economies, espionage, and militaries. You take control of one of these seven factions, each of which has its own unique asymmetric victory conditions, and command their leadership council to build a movement that can reach your goals in a fascinating, ever-shifting political landscape.
The other part of it is a detailed simulation of human expansion into the solar system, including the militarization and industrialization of space, the likes of which I've never seen in a video game. It's complete with real-time space combat and years-long travel between solar bodies. Using a jaw-dropping array of near-future and science fiction techs, you're expected to figure out how best to build ships, colonies, and stations able to produce the space resources you need to win the fight.
Either of these two games would be pretty fun on its own, and they both have interesting ideas alongside very cool, well-designed systems, but at times they're so different that the whiplash I experienced just from playing minute to minute got extreme. Terra Invicta's weakest links are the places where these two intricate games come together, and they’re so different that you could very easily love one and hate the other. Even if you love both ideas like me, it isn't exactly easy to walk the walk of alien arrival geopolitics and chew the gum of Newtonian physics-based battles at the same time.
Combine that with an interface that's fighting to keep up with the sheer complexity of the mechanics, let alone allow you to manipulate them, and much of your early time with Terra Invicta is likely to be spent just trying to keep your head above water. I lost my first campaign of Terra Invicta after just over 50 hours played, in part due to the frustrating learning experience of working out the interface between space and Earth’s political shenanigans. My battle of resistance ended as alien factions on Earth crippled too many nations, while my efforts in space lost steam amid a confusion of weird mechanics and ship-design woes. It all culminated in a death spiral I didn't realize I'd entered until it was 10 hours too late to escape.
Death spirals are never fun, but it did reveal the clever nature of Terra Invicta's overall scenario, where Earth's vast resources can allow you to meet your goals… if you're able to leverage them. The aliens may have massive technological advantages at first, but there are literally billions of humans, and they're sitting on the single largest concentration of usable resources in the solar system and already have an economy in place to use them.
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Perhaps the coolest thing in Terra Invicta are the seven conspiratorial factions. In turn, they aspire to submit to, work alongside, prove themselves to, flee from, fight back against, exterminate, or profit from the aliens. Each faction is nicely represented by a key character, all of whom are fleshed out by quotes and voiced dialogue every time new research or major events pop off. It's nice that you get flavor from every faction leader over time, as it's possible that a weak faction won't be one you engage with directly.
Every one of the factions has wildly different plans. When playing as The Resistance you're trying to strengthen Earth to fight off the aliens, unite its people, and preserve the human way of life as much as possible. Humanity First, meanwhile, has a similar goal but with more genocidal flavor, and is willing to do anything to wipe the aliens out — like encouraging terrorist bombings on pro-alien nations or nuclear strikes against alien targets. It's easy for extremist factions to rack up atrocities, a very clever mechanic that hits perpetrators of war crimes with permanent penalties to their global reputation.
At the other extreme are The Servants, who think that aliens are divine beings and whose intentionally easier campaign has you align with the alien cause. Where other factions are fighting what Aliens do, Servants are desperate to contact and communicate with them in a twisting campaign story that takes Terra Invicta to unexpected places given its larger premise.
These ideological differences can lead to some interesting conflicts. In my campaign as The Resistance, I did things like form international coalitions to invade nations and overthrow governments friendly to the aliens. In one exceptional moment I had to unite a feuding US and Europe in an alliance to invade an alien-controlled nation seeking nuclear weapons. In another I had to convince Brazil's neighbors to let them move armies that could exterminate growing alien plant life.
I forged alliances of convenience with groups like Project Exodus, who – while they were squandering resources on trying to escape alien conquest – at least weren't actively working for the bad guys. It’s cool that you can never really “kill” an idea, either. You can weaken or even cripple one of the other factions by stealing their resources, or by assassination, but they will inevitably recruit a new inner circle and rebuild in time.
Your faction's council is how to put your plans into action, picking recruits from a broader pool of candidates with their own loyalties, backgrounds, and traits. I had one counselor who was a paranoid cynic, for example, and while that made her an excellent spy and counterspy it also made her hard to trust with valuable assets, as her true loyalty was difficult to gauge. She also refused to work in unstable and dangerous environments, which are fairly common in a world where the revelation of hostile alien life starts to plunge countries into chaos.
I got pretty attached to my council members. One of my favorites was an Argentine military colonel who led my, uh… deniable operations. (It’s hard for enemy factions to gain popular support when their agents get abducted or killed if they go public.) Her military experience was key, as Counselors' jobs affect the missions they can take on. Spies and soldiers have obvious uses in a shadowy global war, while diplomats and social or religious leaders are great at spreading your cause's ideology, giving you more of the influence resource. Meanwhile top scientists contribute to research efforts as economists and businessmen help find funding or acquire and manage organizations that act like equipment for your council.
You have limited slots on your council, though, and you can't be good at everything. Counselors can only undertake two missions each month, so you constantly have to make hard choices about priorities. Should I send my Resistance spy to investigate a suspected enemy agent or to weaken Servant control in Argentina?
I also love that you can recruit and maintain criminals to support your cause: Sure, the Los Zetas Cartel are bad people, but it's hard to complain when we've got them funneling $40 million a month toward fighting the alien menace.
All this geopoliticking and fighting takes place on a detailed and fairly robust simulation of Earth. The overview screen tracks things like global opinion about each faction, Earth's overall GDP, and the economies of nations, but also details like the level of human-caused climate change. (Or… is it human-caused?) Terra Invicta starts in 2022, which is accurate down to details like Russian forces occupying Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and it's very clear that it wants to simulate every aspect of our world – at least at the macro level.
The coolest example of this is how research works, with two kinds of projects going at any time. There are public projects every faction contributes to that show the bigger arc of what humanity is working towards as well as private projects that benefit your faction alone. You have to split your research output between them, as does everyone else.