TL;DR – 8-Bit Invaders is a great little RTS game and a fitting end point for the short-lived “8-Bit X” trilogy. While the gameplay might be a tad simplistic compared to other games in the genre, the combination of 2 campaigns + 1 co-op campaign + skirmish mode + a new TBS/RTS hybrid mode means it has a ton of content. If you’re a fan of the genre then you’ll know Petroglyph tends to deliver, and in the case of 8-bit Invaders they definitely have!
8-Bit Invaders by Petroglyph is the 3rd game in their 8-bit RTS collection and much like the previous two games (8-Bit Armies and 8-Bit Hordes) it features a charming Voxel art-style, maps that are cluttered with destroyable assets, a fast-paced implementation of the classic RTS formula and a decent amount of content. Veterans of the series will therefore find a lot that’s familiar with 8-Bit Invaders, including the structure of the campaigns (12 missions per faction with each mission containing three objectives, one of which is mandatory and two of which are optional), the challenging skirmish AI that cheats in exactly the same way (perpetual map awareness? You bet!) and the lamentable fact that the co-op lobbies are as dead as a dodo. To stand out from the two previous games, 8-Bit Invaders adds three new things: New Factions (two of them), New Campaigns (three including the co-op one) and a new “Multiverse” mode that functions as a hybrid RTS/TBS strategy mode.
Starting from the top, the two new factions in 8-Bit Invaders are the “Galactic Marine Corp” (hereafter referred to as the Marines) and the “Invaders”. Of the two the Marines are by far the most familiar for series veterans or indeed anyone who has ever played a Westwood game such as C&C Tiberium Sun or Red Alert 2. You’ve got your traditional HQ, Power Plant, Barracks, Drone Foundry, Airfield and Tech Lab alongside two turrets – one for ground units and one for air units – and two newish buildings in the form of the Resource Enhancer which increases resources per harvester and a Titan Unit factory which replaces the Super Weapons that were in the previous games (more on that later). Like other games in the 8-Bit series, adding additional factories does not add new production queues like in most RTS games, but instead increases the production rate of your existing factory/factories (you can switch which factory the unit comes out of though). The units are a bit less familiar and have a Sci-Fi flavour, but are still easy enough to wrap your head around as there aren’t too many.
For infantry you’ve got Marines with guns who are decent against enemy infantry and air units, Harpies who are melee infantry with jetpacks that let them jump over small elevations in the terrain and F.I.D.Os which are deployable & stealthy mini-turrets that can shoot air and ground units.
For armoured units you’ve got two types of walkers – O.G.R.Es and Manticores with the former being able to shoot while moving & crush infantry while the latter need to be stationary to fire but can shoot both ground and air units, joining them are the GORGON tanks that deal splash damage and are great against ground units.
Finally you’ve got a handful of air units, the Shrike anti-air flier that can’t shoot ground units, the Medusa that acts as a heavily armoured helicopter gunship that can shoot both air & ground units plus the lightly armoured Gremlin that can’t attack but can heal friendly units. All of these units and buildings have large health bars, with the first 3 bars acting as “shields” that regenerate outside of combat. This means that the Marine units are fairly tanky and their ability to regenerate outside of combat gives them the ability to engage in hit-and-run attacks without too much risk, especially the O.G.R.Es which can shoot while moving. Compared to the Invaders however, Marine units tend to be much more expensive and the fact that they have to worry about their power supply means that building up a base can be slower (plus their turrets are disabled if the power supply goes down). As for their call-in abilities, you’ve got Overdrive which makes all Marine Units move faster albeit at the cost of them losing their shields (I didn’t use it that much aside from the occasional campaign mission which had a time limit objective) and… erm… another one that I have never used.
The Invaders on the other hand are a bit more unusual, as they don’t have to worry about their base having enough power but they do have a population cap to worry about which requires the construction of buildings to increase. This means that you can’t easily knock out their (very powerful) turrets, but if you’re playing them you’ll need to be constantly building new “Motivator” buildings which increase the pop cap. Most of the buildings they have are otherwise identical to those that the Marines have albeit with different names, although they do have the Parasite Hive building which gives you the ability to gain vision within an area via seeing what enemy units there can see. This is one of the powers they have, alongside the ability to designate a small zone on the map as an area where each newly trained unit will appear. Neither of these powers are particularly powerful, as the first one has a very limited duration and the latter only lets you move a relatively small amount of new units to an area.
As for their units, they are generally weaker and more specialised but are often cheaper with a few exceptions. For the Infantry you’ve got Xenodogs which are melee only infantry that create a hazardous acid pool which only damages the enemy when they die, standard Invaders that can shoot both air and ground units but are weak against infantry and Brain Bugs that make units around them invisible but are fairly weak themselves.
In terms of armoured units you’ve got Stink Bugs that are short-ranged anti-infantry specialists, Tripods that are walkers that can move while shooting and shoot both air & ground units plus Blast Bugs which are artillery units that can also shoot both air & ground units.
Finally for the air units you’ve got Saucers that are fast and intended for anti-air and anti-infantry use, Flyers which are a slightly slower anti-armour and anti-air equivalent and finally Motherships that heal units around them and which deal decent damage against anti-air and anti-ground targets. As many of these units are relatively cheap (except Tripods and Motherships) it’s tempting to spam them, however doing so will require a balanced mix as many unit types are useless against enemies that they’re not intended to “counter”. Blast Bugs get slaughtered at close range, Saucers are useless against armoured targets, Invaders are hopeless against infantry and so on. I personally found myself using Invaders as a cheap swarm that could deal with vehicles while using Stink Bugs to deal with enemy infantry, or just using vast hordes of Tripods as they are pretty much the only unit in the Invaders arsenal that is good against all enemy types. Either way bring Motherships for the healing, as unlike the Marines there is no shielding available.
Regardless of which faction is your favourite, you’ve got two campaigns with 12 missions each in them so you’ll have plenty of time to get to grips with each faction. I might be biased, but as a relatively experienced RTS player I found them fairly easy and my main piece of advice would be to read the mission “briefings” as they occasionally give tips as to what unit to use (generally the most recent one you’ve unlocked to be fair). I’d also highly recommend aiming for a 3-star rank in each mission, even if that means occasionally resetting the mission you’re currently playing as the bonuses you get for completing the optional objectives make the campaign much, much easier. These bonuses come in the form of pre-completed units and buildings which will let you start completing side objectives early, deny enemies the ability to use their harvesters to gather resources and to leapfrog the early stages of the tech-tree (such as it is). Something that newer players might miss in 8-Bit Invaders is that the maps each have crates lying around which can be “collected” by infantry units and that will then grant you free units or extra cash. Collecting these crates often lets your starting force snowball in strength which then lets you clear through the pre-deployed enemies on the map with relative ease while you build up an army at your base. Other than these general tips, I don’t have too much to say about these campaigns aside from the fact that they’re pretty fun and most of the missions aren’t particularly lengthy. They’re almost all relatively normal skirmish maps, with a bunch of enemies scattered around alongside those crates mentioned just above. There are a handful that don’t let you build additional units, plus one “defence” mission but these are the exceptions to the overall norm.
Speaking of the norm, 8-Bit Invaders follows the pattern set by it’s predecessors by highly encouraging and rewarding an aggressive focus on your economy in the early game followed by using massive groups of units to smash apart enemy bases. You’ll want to have multiple harvesters, I’d generally say no less than four active at any given time as in 8-Bit Invaders these units just stick onto a resource point and they don’t need to constantly head back to their base or a refinery building. Once you’ve got these harvesters, be sure to build multiple factories/barracks so that you can increase the build speed of your units – again I generally had 4 or 5 of each factory type so I could spam Marines/Invaders as a front wave, with Manticores/Tripods behind them to deal tougher enemies. If you’ve got enough harvesters then you’ll be able to pump out wave after wave of units and flood the enemy, while still having enough new units come out that you can defend your base against an inopportunely timed enemy attack. Of the two factions I had a preference for the Marines as I appreciated the fact that their units had regenerating shields and required less micromanagement, but to be fair their is a primordial joy to spamming so many Invaders that the game started to lag. Be careful when spamming units however, as the Titan Units which replace super weapons in this game can be lethal against hordes of cheaper units. Unlike every other unit in the game, these Titan Units are restricted to 1 per player at a time, and are the units themselves are free once their construction building has been completed. Instead of building them manually, they automatically begin building once the building has been completed or upon their death. This process takes 3 minutes, but much like every other unit you can reduce this time by building more than 1 of the Titan Unit buildings. The Marines get a HUGE mech and the Invaders get a HUGE dinosaur. While these units aren’t quite good enough to solo vast swarms of enemy units, they are a big fat force multiplier for your army and take a concentrated effort to put down.
As of the current time I’ve haven’t had the chance to play the co-op campaign ;_; but I did have the opportunity to try out the new “Multiverse” RTS/TBS hybrid mode. As someone who has enjoyed these modes in other RTS games, including Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2 and C&C 3: Kane’s Wrath I was pretty optimistic that this would be another quasi-RISK board game layer on top of a solid RTS game. Initial impressions were good as you can play as any faction from the 8-Bit Series including those from Armies and Hordes so long as you own those games. Unfortunately the Multiverse mode is heavily flawed and while it’s not terrible I don’t think I could honestly recommend it unless you were truly, utterly desperate for more 8-Bit Invaders goodness. The issue is pretty straightforward and alas seemingly impossible to resolve, but let me explain how the mode works first.
Essentially there are two players on a Hex board, split into various territories each of which contains a native garrison force and potentially a bonus for the meta-game in the form of additional resources or better vision over adjacent Hexes. So far in this review I’ve described it as a TBS layer, but really it’s still an RTS albeit a very slow one that has you building and moving troops in real time. The build queue is the same as it is for each faction, although you do now need to “research” buildings with gems that you gain by annexing various hexes. In each hex that you own, you can build buildings up to a maximum of 3 and also units so long as you’ve got the right buildings (e.g. Barracks for Marines, War Factory + Tech Lab for Manticores etc). These buildings always stay put and serve as your garrison, alongside any units you’ve built and these buildings & units will appear on that hex’s map should that hex be attacked. You can also take garrisoned units out of the garrison and use them as an Attack Force, which can be dragged onto adjacent hexes and this is how you attack new territories. When attacking you can either auto-resolve the battle, or play it manually which starts up a RTS map where you have a HQ and whatever units were in your Attack Force. As each territory initially has indigenous defenders, you need to have a decent attack force lest you get overwhelmed – and of course if the enemy player has taken that territory then you fight their garrison. When attacking a 10 second countdown begins, which just gives you enough time to shuttle around nearby troops and garrisons to help you defend.
With those basics out of the way, I’d like to now dismantle what is theoretically a very cool game mode in 8-Bit Invaders. The first issue is the fact that as it’s in real time and battles have a countdown, one of the main issues you face is the clunky interface for transferring units from Garrisons through to Attack Forces and then sending them where they need to be. You have to drag and drop each unit between Garrisons and Attack Forces, which takes time and you need to drag and drop each Attack Force to each hex you want them to travel to. If you want to build up a garrison, you need to either deal with the perennial drag that is the dragging-and-dropping or have built the correct buildings in each hex where you want to produce them (which is very expensive). To make matters worse, moving a group of units from Hex A to Hex C involves dragging them into an Attack Force one-at-a-time, dragging this Attack Force to Hex B, then dragging it to Hex C. Now that’s if you can wait for a stack to build up, but if the enemy attacks your territory you’ll find yourself frantically dragging and dropping each unit one-by-one into an Attack Force and hoping they make it there in time (which they probably won’t). So to prevent this from happening, you now need to drag units into Attack Forces one-by-one as they get built and then drag these Attack Forces across the hexes they need so that they can be in the right place to defend your borders.
Obviously the AI doesn’t have this issue, which gives them a slight edge on the metaverse layer. The flipside is that the AI can only auto-resolve battles, which is a handicap as the auto-resolve tool is kind of bullshit meaning that they need to build up larger forces to be able to take territories. HOWEVER this auto-resolve nonsense ends up being the biggest issue, as if you have the audacity to have a lightly defended territory near the AI, guess what they’re going to do? Attack it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Did that sentence seem repetitive? Well then imagine how I felt playing the same map more than a dozen times in a row, because as soon as I won the skirmish the AI sent yet another wave of 6 units at my territory as I waited for my garrison to slowly build up. I’d try to send in neighbouring units, but I only had 10 seconds between each battle and those units were also incredibly slow to build. Oh and as a fun bonus if the AI was able to kill one of my garrison units, that meant my future auto-resolve chance would be lower meaning I’d get to appreciate that same skirmish map yet again! As a consequence my multiverse campaign took around 4 hours, featuring around 15 hexes and around 40ish battles – of which 90% were on the same two maps. If you do want to play this mode, I cannot stress enough that you should have two stacks, one to attack and one to sit in the newly liberate territories. You should have as small a border space with the AI as possible, and in spite of these preparations prepare for repetition.
Now don’t get me wrong, this mode is definitely a good idea and if you can find someone to play it with then I imagine it’s good fun. Unfortunately, the AI is a total pain in the arse to deal with and while the skirmishes themselves are easy enough the meta-layer is a bit a grind. One thing that was neat about it was the fact that larger maps had pre-existing bases populated by enemies and buildings from the other (non 8-bit invaders) factions and that occasionally these forces would spawn next to the enemy AI and nuke them before they got to do anything. Of course sometimes this would happen to you too, and of course if you lose the territory you lose all of your garrison forces (the same rule applies to attacking forces to be fair). Oh and unfortunately you need to take them out too to win, so even if you destroy the invading force quickly you still need to hunt down the random “occupied” AI force. At least they don’t build any new units, so once you’ve dealt with their quasi-garrison they’re harmless. What isn’t harmless is the fact that the enemy AI cheats (even on normal) by having total map awareness, as such if you use your Attack Force to try and destroy the enemy early, then you had best guess which spawn point they’re in accurately or they’re just going to rush your base while your force is trying to find them. Then they’ll win, and you’ll lose all those units which were so slow to build. FUN!
Of course there’s also a skirmish mode to enjoy, alongside the ability to play against other players. Unfortunately the 8-Bit series didn’t have much staying power, so most players didn’t hang around for long and I say that as someone who played 8-Bit Armies shortly after release. As such I’d recommend treating this game as a fun little pair of campaigns, with a side of skirmish should you feel that you haven’t played enough. The Multiverse mode is worth a look, but for the love of god bear in mind my advance from earlier lest you be frustrated. In summary, 8-Bit Invaders is a cool little RTS game that is a good end point for the series and has plenty of content for fans both new or old. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to RTS fans, and I honestly wouldn’t find it hard to recommend to novices either as it’s pretty intuitive and not excessively difficult. Plus if you can persuade a buddy to buy it, then you can enjoy the co-op campaign together and maybe even get a good Multiverse game out of it!