Saving the world grand strategy-style.
If you’ve played any of the XCOMs, the premise here will be familiar—appropriately enough, given that it comes from the people behind Enemy Unknown’s cult hit mod The Long War. Aliens are attacking present-day Earth and it’s up to you to figure out why they’re here, what they’re made of, and send them packing. Or maybe make friends. Or just profit from the chaos. We’ll get to that in a minute.
The difference is that this shadow war plays out across a detailed map of Earth and the entire solar system involving Lagrange points, interface orbits, and delta-v calculations for sending rockets to mine asteroids. The physics stuff isn’t quite as granular as something like Kerbal Space Program, but it’s close. And there are many dozens more celestial bodies when you include all the asteroids, moons, and Kuiper belt objects. It’s legitimately jaw-dropping, and terrifying at first.
Down on Earth, you can click on a nation to see stats like environmental sustainability, wealth inequality, and education—all of which can shift over time through the influence of various pro-human and pro-alien factions. Even for a seasoned grand strategy player with thousands of hours in Europa Universalis, it’s a lot. The sheer amount of stuff being simulated creates an almost incomprehensibly rich board for the war against the aliens to play out on. And sometimes that works in its favor. Other times it can get in the way.
The main tools you have to interact with this sprawling corner of space are your councilors—recruitable agents with jobs like Astronaut and Tech Billionaire, personal traits like Addict and Elder Statesman, and different missions they can be deployed on like Investigate Alien Activity and Control Nation. You’re not playing as a country here, but rather one of several factions with a shared ideology. The Resistance is the most straightforward, simply wanting to fight the aliens and get them to leave. Project Exodus has decided that the better part of valor is assembling a generation ship and getting the hell out of here. The Servants are a religious cult that wants nothing more than to bow down to the aliens.Why we fight
Through propaganda, bribes, and espionage, your faction can gain influence over the world’s various nations and nongovernmental organizations, allowing you to control their armies and space programs, dip into their funding, and even socially engineer them with environmental and welfare programs if you’re feeling a bit utopian. From the default start date of 2026, it was definitely cathartic to seize control of the deep state and Green New Deal the failing United States back into a functional republic like the conspiracy theorists are always claiming we want to.
The UI for all of this can be a little obtuse and disorganized. Especially with the amount of information you need to make optimal decisions, it’s a constant friction point, with some odd omissions like the inability to sort certain important columns in spreadsheets.
