Game Check: Terra Invicta – Alien invasion breaks genre boundaries – News

teasers

Terra Invicta is from the Long War modders, which Xcom 2 fans might (or might not) find promising. It is a genre-breaking monster of complexity with an exciting alien scenario.

You may know the developers of Pavonis Interactive through their mods Long War and Long War 2 for Xcom respectively xcom 2. With Terra Invicta they recently sent their first own work into Early Access. In the broadest sense it is a strategy game. But it is more about a special scenario: Mankind is not alone in space. What then playfully follows the crash of an alien ship shatters genre boundaries – but also the usual complexity expectations of a strategy game.

In this check, I’ll tell you whether innovation and fascination also lead to a good game. In any case, be prepared for the fact that Terra Invicta will not be accessible to everyone, and especially not immediately: The learning curve is very steep, and when you then slowly get to know how the alien rabbit runs in the middle part, the real-time tactics Ship fights as a frustration wall to be climbed again.

What your advisors can do depends on their background. Through leveling, implants and associated organizations, they become more and more powerful and versatile.

The aliens are coming: the struggle for the future

The arrival of the aliens is a milestone in human history. The game is as gigantic as the event itself: seven factions think they have found the answer to the extraterrestrial visitors. From escape to submission to annihilation, everything is included that you can think of as a strategy. And then they act according to their goal. If you’re going to leave Earth anyway, what do you care about its nuclear contamination? You only find out the concrete victory conditions in the course of the game, but in between you always get campaign tasks.

Terra Invicta is a real-time game. This applies, for example, to complex research and the deployment of armies and spaceships. Most important are your (cosmetically changeable) advisors who give you clues and do the dirty work for you: murder, propaganda, attacking aliens, kidnapping, taking over space stations, diplomacy with other factions and much more. To do this, the game is paused and you give all advisors orders at the same time, so that Terra Invicta is partly phase-based. The missions vary in length. For example, in one phase you can start a faster propaganda mission and try to take over a control point in the same area with another advisor. He then benefits from the propaganda. The chance of success of the agent’s actions depends heavily on the advisor’s skills, which you can increase by using resources.

The more control points you keep in a country, the more you can use its power for the different resources like money and control centers. You can really manage and steer “your” countries, up to alliances or declarations of war. Again you have the choice: Do you rather rely on big all-rounders like the USA? Or many small countries that you might unite into a community à la EU? Or do you want to control small specialists like Kazakhstan with its spaceport or North Korea with its nuclear bomb (in case of emergency…)?

This is how the genre mix works
But how does the whole thing actually play out? The setting and the sense of threat stem from, of course X Com. But there is also a portion in Terra Invicta Stellaris? Do you move armies or just click around in menus? Struggling for influence in countries sounds like the Cold War board game Twilight Struggle, so more of a board game vibe emerges, is it a geopolitics simulator? And the intricate ship design is reminiscent of Kerbal Space Program. What now?

The answer is “everything a little”. Basically, Terra Invicta runs in (accelerated) real time. For example, you click on an army and select an action. In the case of “Deploy” you aim at a neighboring region and then see the unit “march” there. Alien armies are also visibly moving across the globe. You see advisors as portraits, they have their own menu with character values, mission overview and so on – comparable to status screens in a role-playing game (the agents also level up). You’ll spend a lot of time zooming in, out, and panning to get an overview of the political situation, as well as the location and status of agents, fleets, and space stations – all seamlessly throughout the solar system. And you look a lot at statistics and overviews.

Land battles take place visualized on the globe, but apart from “retreat” there is no possibility of influence. Space station invasions are purely a dice action, dependent on troop numbers and other factors. Space battles, on the other hand, are carried out (unless you “roll the dice” or let the AI ​​intervene) as complex real-time tactics with a lot of micromanagement: You steer your ships down to the last detail, let them rotate around their own axis, whereby there are many tactics. For example, sending an anti-missile ship ahead with heavy frontal armor, even if it’s hardly manoeuvrable – it’s only supposed to absorb damage. I think most likely The Expanse one as a model for the space battles. Until you master ship design, see next section, and space battles, you will have to learn a lot.

If my attack works, this advisor will no longer dispute my positions.

Build and research space stations

As you reshape the map on Earth, either peacefully or militarily, you increasingly have to take care of space as well. You build space stations in orbit, which initially primarily help with research. Research is divided into Global Research and Projects. All factions benefit from global research. Whoever has contributed the most to a new technology can then determine the next research field. With enough know-how, you can specifically control or block certain technologies. Global research unlocks projects with a time delay that you can research specifically for your faction (or steal from other factions!). Only then, for example, new modules for your space stations or larger checkpoints are possible.

One resource is special: you need “Boost” to transport tonnage from earth to space. While you’ll continue to wrestle on Earth throughout the game, you’ll also continue to wrestle in the solar system in the early midgame! Since you often run out of this resource at the beginning, you should build mines on other celestial bodies as quickly as possible. With the resources gained in this way, such as rare earths, you can build stations, modules and spaceships directly in zero gravity instead of transporting them there at great expense. This will also change how you should best manage your lands. Quite apart from the fact that the earth is burning more and more. Incidentally, you can seamlessly zoom and scroll back and forth between stations, earth and celestial bodies.

Overhanging all of this is the threat of the aliens I fought as the Resistance. I grappled with their allied factions and even took out two alien agents. When I shot down an alien ship in a tactical battle for the first time, the aliens were angry and in revenge they destroyed one of my stations. So you always have to think carefully about when you want to go how far and whether it’s worth it. If you use the good overviews and statistics, you are always well informed.

Ship design and combat is a science in itself and requires an extra dose of training. Alternatively, you can leave the battles or individual ships to the AI ​​or have them calculated automatically.

Conclusion

I don’t know what’s more impressive: Pavonis Interactive’s bold approach to wanting to build a highly complex and even astronomy and physics-aware alien invasion simulator, or that it succeeds brilliantly. Rarely have I experienced a game that unfolds like Terra Invicta and always reveals new facets of game mechanics, while still offering so many ways!

And the longer the game lasts, the more its complexity unfolds. I’m constantly rattling on which strategies I should definitely try. Terra Invicta is a very special experience, especially on the first round. With the aliens and factions, it builds up (opponent) players whose goals you may not be clear about at first. I have never experienced it in this pronounced form. Rarely have I been so happy about milestones like my first space station, a downed spaceship or a base on the moon as in Terra Invicta. In further games you can always develop new strategies. And discover even more. The replay value is enormous due to the diverse (starting) options and strategies.

But the training effort is also enormous, Terra Invicta is a clear case for time-blessed genre professionals (or extremely suffering advanced users). You are almost forced to use other sources such as the official wiki again and again after the tutorial. But even in the first run you will learn something new. Even through your own mistakes, which you can usually correct. My first real run took around 40 hours. I think I’m quite successful and in the midgame. So you should bring time with you. Thanks to the very good auto breaks, however, I now often play at a very high speed, so that future games will be shorter.

You will hardly notice the early access status of the game, which runs very smoothly once it has been loaded. There are no texts missing, the user interface offers many comfort functions and finally a clever outliner. Balancing and a number of other aspects are still being worked on. The gaming experience is rounded off musically by the Breakdown Epiphanies from Hamburg, which is already at Battle Brothers caused a sensation. For me, Terra Invicta is a candidate for the most ambitious and extraordinary game of this year!

• Real time alien invasion geopolitics space battle simulator
• single player
• For professionals
• Price: 39.99 euros
• In one sentence: genre-breaking, multi-layered and exciting alien invasion simulator with a steep learning curve.