Terra Invicta Review – Earth Is A Battlefield

When it comes to alien invasions in strategy games, the gold standard for the last decade or so has been XCOM.  And for almost that long, the gold standard in mods for XCOM has been “The Long War,” an elaborate and intense reworking of the basic formula to make it clear to players that E.T. is not going home without a lot of bullets fired and bodies stacked up. So when the makers of “The Long War” decided to turn their hand to an original work, we got Terra Invicta, a title which has only now left Early Access after making a big splash three years. It was striking when it first launched in Early Access, and three years seem to have been well spent.

Terra Invicta twists the “aliens invade Earth” trope found in games like XCOM and Phoenix Point by going the grand strategy route instead of tactical “bug hunting.” You must lead one of seven different factions, each with their own agendas, to respond to the presence of alien invasion. Using individuals who make up your faction’s Council as operatives, you must convince nations to flock to your cause and apply their resources to your efforts. As you progress, you’ll also be able to unlock new technologies, build up infrastructure on other worlds, and even take the fight to the aliens themselves beyond the confines of Earth’s gravity well.

It’s hard to believe that Terra Invicta has only just left Early Access. Seems like it’s only been a a little while, when in fact it’s been three years and some change since my first look at it. And in that three years, Pavonis Interactive has been polishing their first standalone title to a high gloss. Just from the visual standpoint alone, Terra Invicta doesn’t seem to have lost a step. It’s gorgeously detailed, beautifully rendered, and cleanly presented. The UI is generally easy to navigate, the ship models are highly detailed, the various visual effects just pop wonderfully on the screen. It kind of makes me wonder what the heck they’ve been up to for three years.

On the audio side of things, Terra Invicta also doesn’t seem to have changed very much, and this is maybe not quite as much of a good thing. While the production quality of sound on its Early Access launch was not perfect, it was certainly quite good. Things do not seem to have appreciably improved in the three years since entering Early Access. Voice acting is still quite good, though mismatches between text and voice in tech tree achievements are still present here and there. Music remains nicely done, but remains somewhat unobtrusive. There’s not a lot of pulse-pounding “hell, yeah!” kind of themes playing, which genuinely suits the overall tone. Sound effects (even the ones in space which we shouldn’t realistically hear) are crisp and continue to help anchor the player.

Probably the biggest changes that I’ve come across are in the gameplay. And even those seem to be pretty small, fine adjustments rather than gross additions. It’s not a stretch to say that Terra Invicta is not going to be a quick in-and-out sort of experience. Even the “streamlined” options presented make it a case where it’ll be a while between Turn 1 and “giant space battles.” And honestly, that’s OK. Grand strategy is supposed to take a while. And even if you cut down the factions involved to you and one other human faction (the aliens are always present), there’s still a lot of good gameplay going on. That all said, there are elements of gameplay which are still a little opaque. Better tutorials and a little better guidance on more abstruse elements like how best to constitute your Council would be a welcome aid to new players. There is a “Codex” feature where you can look up what certain elements do and how certain actions operate, but it may be a bit dense and overwhelming for somebody new to the genre. Even on the “Forgiving” difficulty, there’s a lot of moving parts to keep track of.

Of course, if you just want to fool around with the real-time space combat portion and not deal with all the tedious mucking about in politics and skulduggery, Terra Invicta has you covered on that. Pick your combatants, load up your fleet lists, and get ready for some big old space battles. I will say that, even with “cinematic” options enabled, it’s going to be a very different sort of experience from somebody with previous experience in other RTS games like Homeworld. This is another area where better tutorials and perhaps an “operations officer” assistant might be helpful. You can just poke around and try to dope it out on your own, but better guidance really would be a benefit here.

For all the time between Early Access and now, it’s hard to say exactly what changed in Terra Invicta. This might be the first time I’ve had to go looking through patch notes to try and reconstruct what changed from those first days in Early Access. Normally, those changes are big and obvious. Here, Pavonis Interactive went the other way, small iterative changes and fixes while keeping the basic structure intact. It’s both a testament to their skill that they got so much of the basics right at the start and that they didn’t go nuts trying to throw things at the wall to see what stuck. Now that it’s officially out, I’m excited to see what comes next.

Axel reviewed Terra Invicta on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.