Honestly, the tutorial won’t even get you started, and you’ll spend the first couple hours making mistakes. If you’re into strategy games, the payoff is pretty good. It’s complicated, with a lot of mechanics. As aliens invade, you play as one of seven factions. Defeat, join, or escape the sodding mess that is Earth. It takes place in three different phases, starting with a Geoscape similar to XCOM. You don’t start as a country like in XCOM. To control countries, the faction’s counsellors go around influencing them. They can also investigate aliens, spy on other faction counsellors, and do coup d’etats.
As soon as you secure a country, you get money, ops, research points, influence, and most importantly, a boost. The boost determines whether or not you can launch stuff into space, so it’s kind of like a transition. You can micromanage each country’s alliances, wars, and armies. As you battle alien invaders, you’ll need to build space platforms, moon bases, orbital shipyards, and fleets. In the last phase, you expand to the outer planets of the solar system and take out alien bases with fleets. You’ll have to figure out delta-v, fuel, and space battles.
There’s also the alien threat. As you play, you’ll learn more about these mysterious invaders. Lots of lore to read, and a huge tech tree to explore. In addition, each faction has different goals, so there’s a lot of replayability. Before you know it, you’re just waiting for your next move and it’s morning and you’ve played all night. The game also reminds me of The Expanse, which is about mankind’s expansion into the solar system and a mysterious alien threat.
