Terra Invicta Early Access Review
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
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