Terra Invicta

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• Recommended Posted January 27, 2026 on Steam This game is actually somewhat challenging for me to recommend to many people. I think this game has something a lot of people have trouble with (as evidenced by some other reviews, which I think are people correctly identifying that this game does not work for them) so I just want to frontload this with some caution for anyone potentially interested in this game. Still, if the idea of this game sounds interesting to you and you have the grit needed to stomach making frequent mistakes or a willingness to start fresh a few times there is no other game like this that I have played. If you are comfortable with grand strategy games like Europa Universalis and also comfortable with losing is fun games like dwarf fortress this game is in your strike zone. This is quite a long game, as it stands less than 10% of owners have beaten it, and I suspect that number will probably stay pretty true throughout this game' existence. Still, it is also deceptively forgiving on the regular difficulties, and it takes far more than many realize to reach a true failure state which is unfortunately something that is not evident until you get a lot more experience with the game. There is even an achievement for winning as the resistance after an alien-aligned faction achieves their victory condition. It is also a very complex game. There are two main layers to the game: earth and space. Both have different intricacies and importance depending on how far into a campaign you are. Each layer contains a huge amount of information that at first feels like trying to memorize a textbook in your head. As you play more, you will probably have many "So THAT is why that is useful!" moments as you go through. This is a game that throws many different tools at you at once. You have to learn which wrench used is for certain bolts and which hammer is best for certain alien heads. When you get to space it throws a second different toolbox at you for good measure. I restarted my games several times when I realized how some things work. Even then I could have probably still played through and won just with some added difficulty and time. It truly feels like a game where you start as a hopelessly outmatched rag-tag group trying their best against an advanced alien race and their lackies. At game start you are hopelessly outmatched. The aliens have technology that far out classes your own, and to make matters worse you have at least two human factions that also want to work with the aliens. At game start you have no idea what you are up against. You represent an illuminati-like faction whose objective is to (if playing as the recommended start faction resistance) understand and fight back against an unknown alien threat. You may start off looking at all the nations of the world and grab a whole bunch of European countries. UK and Germany have decent tech and military and are fairly easy to grab and are under your control point cap with some flexibility for other nations in the world. You try to unify them into a federalized European Union (after de-brexiting the UK) but find out actually only the union leader France can do that. Unfortunately, a different faction has control of France and it is going to be a pain to knock them out. Oh well, you continue onwards, or maybe if you are like me restart. After a year of work and a new space station in orbit you finally have enough resources to try to take out the single ship in orbit conducting surveillance. You are warned that this is very bad and you should probably try to stop it. You send 6 ships after a single alien ship conducting surveillance. Of your six ships, three burn like paper to the lasers of the alien ship. The three remaining ships that got close found out that your navy battleship sized cannons actually don't do much damage to the ship, if they even reach it at all. Turns out chemically propelled chunks of metal aren't fast enough to hit something hundreds of kilometers away in space easily. Worse, it turns out the shots that do hit don't hit hard enough to penetrate its armor. Now you learn about the importance of armor. At first you might try to armor everything, only to find out wow, turns out armoring an entire ship is expensive. You used most of your space boost to build your ships that took mere moments to disintegrate. And armor adds more weight, and thus more boost to create your ship. You now learn the importance of having a space economy. Turns out you don't need boost if you build it with resources mined in space, and maybe it would have been better to have saved your boost for the first moon and Martian bases. You could have gotten resources there and saved so much boost in building your ships. Maybe here you might restart and try again with this knowledge on a fresh run, although if you don't you can definitely still pull off a win I promise. Some may feel this is 4-5 hours wasted, but if you are the type that likes continual refinement against a challenging enemy it's quite fun. It's 2030 again and this time you have a decent space economy. The ships you make this time are still pretty cheap, but instead of the naval guns you built two types of ships. One loaded with torpedoes and one loaded with several 40mm intending to saturate the alien ship with enough garbage that eventually some of it gets through. You learn that actually you didn't need to armor the ships that much. Most of the time your ships nose is the only thing that gets hit since it is pointed towards the enemy anyway. Your 6 layers of boron carbide nose armor managed to save 4 of your six ships and you finally blew up that alien ship. Only to learn that what you took out was the alien equivalent of a national geographic crew when they send two actual combat ships your way and dust your four remaining ships and space station a few months. Strangely you notice they left your lunar and mars bases untouched. Here is where you start to realize your advantages going forward. Those alien ships actually took a pretty long time to retaliate; they had to fly all the way from past Neptune which took months of game time. While those ships were flying maybe you could have built some newer ships with the new lasers you just researched to take out their missiles. They left your mining bases untouched and maybe are underestimating you. Maybe next time they send two ships you will instead have 8 more waiting for them. And on and on it goes until you finally outmatch them, first with sheer quantity, then later with technology. If this kind of strategy and in-game story generation interest you, this game is unlike any I have played and I highly recommend it. If you are averse to having to restart or frequently start fresh with alien-bombarded scratch I would caution you that you may not enjoy this. I also think the actual story in the game is quite good. The writing and characterization of the factions is told mostly through the global technologies you unlock. Each faction has a unique story identity that is actually pretty believable for how people might react to an alien invasion. My favorite being Hanse Castillo and their voice actor portraying an anti-alien insurgent who is determined to win by any means necessary. The Academy is also surprisingly crazy in their goal to achieve mutual recognition with the aliens. There are some other nitpicks. I wish there was more hinting with technologies, especially ship drives, are recommended for. I think categorizing them by intended role might help. The very end game is also a little slow due to distances your fleets travel for solar system cleanup. Overall, though, this is a game built around attaining gradual mastery. Even if you end up at a dead end you can still recover by taking a different route. I have almost 400 hours in this game since its early access and still learn so much each game I play. I hope very much that Pavonis continues to develop this, or other games like this in the future.
• Recommended Posted October 27, 2025 on Steam This game has a level of mechanical complexity and emergent strategy that I have not seen rivaled by any other game. It is essentially an illuminati 4x, space colonization, and space combat sim stapled together. This game's learning curve is incredibly steep, and a playthrough can run up to 100 hours to completion. That kind of commitment isn't for everyone, but if you're on board for that it is an incredible experience. My one critique: Devs, you have got to drop the war with minmaxxers. When you nerf techs and councilor actions in response to the most fine-tuned, 1000+ hour player time players, you are simply gimping the experience for everyone else. Don't be like EU4 where entire mechanics are simply not worth engaging with because they have less than 5-10% chance to do anything. Minmaxxers will ALWAYS find a new cheese, the only thing you are NERFING long term is the FLAVOR of the game.
• Recommended Posted January 5, 2026 on Steam Find Xcom's tactical battles repetitive and boring after a while? Wish you could focus on research and grand strategy without stopping to clear out your 250th crashed UFO? This is the game for you. Imagine if you could zoom out of Xcom's groescape and interact with the whole solar system. Build orbital stations, asteroid/planetary bases, and fleets of ships that adhere to Newtonian physics. Pull the strings and manipulate nations from the shadows. Assassinate or imprison rivals. Direct armies. Launch nukes. And somehow find the time and resources to resist the aliens. Or capitulate to them. Or betray humanity and help them.
• Recommended Posted January 23, 2026 on Steam I really don’t want to give this game a thumbs up - but giving it a thumbs down would also feel unfair. So here we go. TL;DR: The early and mid‑game is fantastic. Unfortunately, in more than 30 years of playing PC and console games, I’ve never had my motivation collapse as quickly in the endgame as it did with Terra Invicta. So what’s the issue? The core gameplay revolves around cycles in which your agents (the so‑called councillors) carry out actions on Earth. You assign tasks, confirm them, hit play, watch time advance, deal with event pop‑ups, and then wait for the cycle to end so you can do it all again. It might sound dull, but it’s actually great fun - piecing together major nation‑states from small countries, developing their spacefaring capabilities, and countering enemy councillors. And of course, the aliens will regularly attempt to land armies on Earth, keeping you constantly on the defensive. By the mid‑game, you might control a third of Earth’s population and enjoy a steady flow of resources from space mining. That’s when you’re expected to take the fight to the aliens. And that’s exactly when the main gameplay loop becomes a slog. Anything you want to accomplish in space takes ages. Want to build a fleet with shiny new technologies to attack an alien outpost near Jupiter? First wait several cycles to gather missing resources. Then wait several more till all ships have been built. Then wait again for the fleet to actually reach Jupiter. Rinse and repeat. This would be tolerable if there were meaningful things to do on Earth in the meantime - but by then you already control enough nations, have ample research capacity, and the most efficient use of your councillors is simply spamming “Advise” on your biggest states for massive research or production boosts. So every cycle becomes the same repetitive set of orders. Occasionally you’ll need to retake a lost part of a state, but for the most part you’re just sitting around waiting for your space operations to finish. And since defeating the aliens in space is a monumental task, you’re probably staring at 30–50 hours of this slow grind. That’s when I realized my time is too valuable for this. However, I had an absolute blast for more than 90 hours in the early and mid‑game, so withholding a thumbs up would be unfair to the developers. Thanks, everyone!
• Recommended Posted January 11, 2026 on Steam This game is not for everyone. In many ways it is spreadsheet gaming. Solar system is easier to navigate via lists of planetary bodies then overview. Fleets and armies are more stats then units, their orders are not point and click but menus to make them to go to certain orbits or regions. Interface in many ways is clunky, design quite outdated and a lot of obvious QoL missing. But for those who are OK with those drawbacks, this game might just be a real treasure. It is complex, with intertwined mechanics. Some of them come online much later then others, so even if you think you figured out the beginning of the game, you'll probably still fail later. This game is strategic. It took me 192 hours to win my first run - I had to restart and reload so many times because mistakes had consequences much later. Planning ahead is paramount, neglecting some aspects will result in lagging behind when those become really important later. And that's on top of pure vibes. Alien invasion, the threat and the potential. A rare timeframe of modern age transitioning into realistic near future shaped by the player. Invention of better techs to become on par with aliens to finally push them back. This game is not for everyone, but it is very rewarding for those, who are ok with mid UX and are interested in setting. Tens of hours of melancholic solar system domination. Be wary of losing your family while contesting Jupiter. P.S. Devs themselves seem to be cool guys. During Early Access I had broken game state that crushed my game. Made a bug report, devs asked for more savefiles to figure out the issue, and then even sent me back a fixed savefile. Good stuff!
• Recommended Posted January 7, 2026 on Steam Crusader Kings with an X-Com skin. --- The game play is heavily rooted in the grand strategy model, while the story is an X-Com derivative influenced by Hearts of iron politics. Overall I have to say the game feels like it was made in 2006 and not 2026. I don't mean it in a bad way, but that it's actually more substance over style. Rather than flashier games that may be style over substance. They didn't shy away from deep mechanics or overly complex interfaces. You can get lost in menus and claw your way through the codex trying to find your next move. Meanwhile the alien invasion looms in the background waiting for you to make a decision. The decision process comes off as turn based, despite trying to hide it behind wait times. The globe and time scale rush by while you really only get to make meaningful decisions at fixed intervals. It's a game firmly rooted in the strategy side of the story in contrast to X-Com's wider layering of tactics. If you've played both old and new X-Com games, the older X-coms were a blend of strategy and tactics. The newer X-Coms leaned more heavily into the tactics while minimizing the strategy layer. And Terra Invicta swings heavily in the other direction, strategy to the point where you might think you're in Crusader Kings reskinned to a modern day alien invasion. In short: I'm trying to say the game is good, but likely for a niche audience. If you need fancy graphics, an amazing soundtrack and lots of action, you're not going to find it here. But you will find an incredibly detailed interface with a variety of meaningful choices to help you navigate through bizarre global politics during a time of international catastrophe while trying to bring humanity to finally launch itself back into space with a wider purpose. You have choices ranging from which countries to take over and how to run their governments, down to how to build modules for starships and which asteroids to investigate for mining across the solar system. It's overwhelming, in a good way. The minimal tutorial serves only as a basic guide to the exhaustive control set up. But don't expect it to teach you how to win. The codex can tell you what each choice does, but it can't tell you which is the right choice; because it depends on what's going on at any given time. Difficulty is as much about the choices you make as it is the random elements that might just decide to end your faction before it even gains traction. You can expect winning to take 100 hours or more, and you can expect losing to take nearly that long before you realize you screwed up 90 hours ago and can't fix your mistakes without starting over. Expect to lose and learn from it until you come up with a strategy capable of overcoming the odds. And then do it again, as the replay value of having different factions with different goals is a nice touch. And that's about all that's worth describing. You either enjoy the grand strategy model with many layers of menu choices or this isn't even your genre. As an added bonus the game is relatively easy to mod and the devs are pretty responsive to community issues and bug reports. --- Bottom line: X-Com if it were a bureaucratic nightmare instead of a tactical skirmish simulator. --- [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38232109/]While you are here, would you consider following my curator page?[/url] [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/kunovega/recommended/]Want to read all of my reviews and not just the curated ones?[/url]