Terra Invicta Reviews
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.
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.