Invisible, Inc.

Very thrilling tactical experience.

Short but really exciting throughout

Excellent turn-based roguelite strategy game. I love the artwork and it supports modding!

Let's hope for more DLC or a sequel!

i like a stealth
i like a turn-based strategy
boom, Invisible Inc.

yes

Absolutely good. I used to play COMMANDOS. I like this one has a modern touch to it and waaay more character customization. That in itself takes it to another level. The turn-based style makes it so enjoyable.

One of my all time favorites

If you like turn based stealth games you will really enjoy Invisible Inc! It has just enough story to string the missions together and the characters are barely more than stereotypes, but the randomly generated levels provide interesting challenges every mission and I enjoyed the resource management of choosing the right targets to best improve my team. The main storyline is very short, but it took me quite a few tries to beat it on Experienced difficulty. Its probably almost laughably short on Beginner. But if you enjoy the gameplay challenging yourself to see how long you can last on Endless is pretty satisfying. Again, I highly recommend this for people who like turn based stealth games and managing limited resources. If that isn't something you like I don't think Invisible Inc will change your mind.

Underrated

This game is very original. It can be tough and challenging at times but that really adds to the excitement.

This game is great.

I like it.

XCom except way less janky and with less bullshit

Good game, but not very forgiving. I would like to have greater ability to rewind small mistakes (the rewinds are good but limited, and usually I just want to rewind a single move not two whole turns). A lot of fun if you don't mind that sort of punishment.

There are far too few games in the Turn-based Stealth Genre (+Roguelike) and Invisible Inc. does a pretty good job in fulfilling such a niche gap in the market.

Gameplay

Balance

• One of your starting agent is probably Internationale because her starting abilities are ridiculously convenient to have and makes ever other characters' starting kits and abilities look like garbage in comparison.
  
  
• There are 4 stats to upgrade but Speed is significantly more beneficial than other stats for every agent, because alarm level increasing over time incentivizes you to finish every mission as quickly as possible, and having Internationale cover as much ground as possible is practically necessary to make the rapier program worthwhile.
  
  
• Agents rescued from detention centers are random (if I knew I was rescuing Shalem, I wouldn't have bothered). They're also rescued with no equipment to be retrieved, so they're made significantly less useful, especially for those with good starting equipment (Shock trap) but less useful passives (Decker detects Daemons, whoop-dee-F'in-doo). Rather than utilizing every agent to the full potential of their abilities, most of the time I find myself using less useful agents to sit on top of unconscious guards full time until extraction, whilst only ~2 agents are actually in play.
  
  
• Killing is a bit too disincentivized because every guard and their moms have heart-monitors which raises the alarm levels, alongside the small amount of cleanup bill you have to pay for some reason, instead of the corpo's you've robbed paying their janitors.
  

Bad luck

• In more than 1 instance does my run get ruined by a stationary enemy I cannot deal with (armored guard, weaponized drones) standing in front of the only door to the room the agents spawned in. Doesn't happen too often, but still annoying.
  
  
[*]Mission generation are pretty random and a bit frustrating, if you're lucky you'll get vault-card missions prior to bank vault missions in particular (and also cybernetic lab missions); sometimes you'd get shop access missions as all options while perpetually poor (game gives very limited currency even if you rob all safes and guards w/ anarchy skill)

It's not exactly a bad game, but progress is very slow. I've completed multiple missions, and I feel like I'm still in the tutorial stage despite playing for multiple hours. Furthermore, there isn't a lot of plot so far, and the missions feel repetitive.

On the good side, there are different abilities to unlock and level up for each character, and they can literally change how you play. However, you only get two characters, and that was another disappointment for me. I was expecting a team of 4, like X-com and similar games. I understand a team of 2 makes it a little more challenging, but having only two people just isn't as interesting.

Again, it's not exactly a bad game, but it's not quite what I expected and a bit too slow with the progression for me.

Great little stealth game! Very fun to play.

Must to have stealth tactic game - 9/10

Excellent game. Tons of fun. Way too short!

Okay, at the very beginning I was thinking: "They thrown away all RPG elements, the plot was cut to the bare minimum, and we have the essence only - actual tactical turn-based gameplay, but how much of that I could get without being bored?.." Just after spending 10 hours in Invisible Inc. I think I have an answer.
Unfortunately, replay potential is low. After a short campaign, player could start from scratch again but at higher difficulty level. Yes, it's somewhat harder but I noticed I play the very same tactics, there's no much space for creativity, to be honest. Then, with the very same plot added on top, I started to feel that groundhog day vibe. No, thanks.

A great stealth game with infinite replayability. I suggest getting the Contingency Plan DLC because it makes the game a lot more fun and challenging

Johny mnemonic but its xcom.
10/10 would recommend
(Door closing simulator intensifies)

Stealth strategy is a niche genre, this game does it pretty well.

crummy xcom like

After all that time this is still really good. Actually more than that, excellent.

Really unique and difficult

Love it! Great game.

This is one of Klei's older pieces, but still one of the best strategy games of all time. If you're going for 100% completion, this is gonna be a really hard game, and getting used to your strategies can be quite the learning curve. Difficulty can definitely make this a hard game to get into, but it's a very fun singleplayer experience, and the DLC doesn't add too much in terms of power, but Draco and Derek are insane gaming potentials. Love it, 8/10.

I'm generally not a huge fan of turn-based games, but the tactical elements managed to keep me going for about 20 hours. Then tediousness set in.

Bought it on sale. Got my money's worth.

7/10

Criminally short & so much potential left unused - my 3,5h playtime represents a full playthroughs of the 'standard' non-DLC campaign.

Yet all the missions are basically full RNG - there's no reason they couldn't have given you more stuff to chew on with that, considering they didn't have to actually design and script the full levels - just the tilesets and procedural generator.

And the (tropey as hell) story never changes. This setting & art could've given life to dozens, even hundres of mini-campaigns or multi-stage missions, but there's just one. A very short one.
The production value is good, mind you, but it's a short story with a cheap "mystery" style setup - where's the replay value in that mystery once it's revealed?

So there's extremely little reason to replay the very short RNG campaign, unless you really can't get enough of the mechanics. It fails to go give me any XCOM / Darkest Dungeon "long term" campaign progression & resource management, nor does it give me the Hades / Synthetik roguelite immediate "mechanical" gratification (it's turn based tactics after all).
Maybe the endless mode is where the meat is supposed to be, but then why all the focus and marketing about the campaign & cutscenes?

On top, the RNG is badly weighted (or not weighted at all?). As others have pointed out, the campaign missions are effectively a dice roll as to whether they're ridiculously hard or basically auto-complete...

For what the game seems to promise & the pricetag attached, I was very disappointed.

This game seems to have flown under the radar for a lot of people but I remember liking it a lot.

Good!

Invisible Inc. is headstrong, aggressive, unpredictable, arrogant, hard to work with, and absolutely worth the trouble.

Invisible Inc. is a fun, well-designed turn-based tactics game, reminiscent of the XCOM games. It was a bit tough to get into at first, but once I did, I played it for many hours straight until I completed it, taking about 18 hours over the course of three playthroughs, two of them failed.

It’s a tough game, even on Beginner difficulty (though I disabled level retries), until you understand how to play it well: inventory management and racking up credits, as well as generally playing carefully and purchasing the right items and programs, are the keys to winning.

I do have my gripes here and there, though, and I don’t hold this game on as high a pedestal as I do XCOM 2. For one, many items feel like they aren’t good enough to be used. Most items you’ll never use, and some characters feel as though they’re far superior to others. I also had a lot of credits (15,000 or so) in the end-game with nothing to spend it on, and the game became too easy in the later levels, about 75% through the playthrough – though I did play on Beginner difficulty.

While I had a lot of fun with this game, I don’t feel immediately inclined to jump into another playthrough. The game began to feel repetitive once I’d experienced all the different level types, and despite the multiple different agents and variety of programs and items, and the procedural generation of the levels, I don’t think this is a game that can keep you entertained for hundreds of hours like XCOM 2 or a roguelike game.

Nevertheless, I got 24 hours of total playtime out of this game, and I’ll probably come back to it in the future. It may not be infinitely replayable, but I still thoroughly enjoyed my playthroughs: both the failed runs, where lessons were learnt, and my final, successful one.

If you enjoy turn-based tactical strategy games like XCOM 2, Phoenix Point, and Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, you’ll absolutely enjoy Invisible, Inc. And it’s got a really clever title, so that’s a plus! It’s also cheap, especially on sale, so there’s no excuse: buy it now!

depth

A novel game concept, and I like the turn based approach and having to think things through

I had a lot of fun playing this one: It plays like stealth-focused Fire Emblem. The fact that it's rogue-lite makes this game almost endlessly unplayable, and I definitely feel as if I can come back to it and play again without feeling completely worn out. If you enjoy strategy games or stealth games, you'll probably like this one.

Can't recommend this enough. If you like the setup and grid movement of xcom, or into the breach, this has a similarish feel. The music and aesthetic is great.

Cool turn-based spy game. It is also a stealth game until you make it not.

Never ever give your AI system the freedom to choose, control and direct your actions in any circumstances, regardless of how well your failsafe proctocol is installed. Things never turn out fine in the end, and that includes the Art department (irl).

Rating: 78%

You know a game is a masterpiece when it's turn based, yet parts of it play in your mind like the escape sequence of a heist movie. This game is the very definition of "a game is a series of interesting choices": every action you take is a challenging risk-reward decision that will keep you on your toes until your agents make the tense run for the exit pad.
After the excellent 2D action stealth game Mark of the Ninja, Klei shows it can do it just as well with a turn based isometric game.

Haven't played this in ages, but it was fun. Very impressive they made a turn based stealth game and somehow made it work very well.

I came back to this game after many years and I'm having a blast once again.

I really wanted to like Invisible Inc. The positive reviews, the cool art style, and it being turn-based tactics which is one of my favorite genres, AND stealth which is another favorite genre of mine - made it seem like this would be right up my alley. Sadly, the game severely failed to meet my expectations, and even though the 4 hours I spent with it were somewhat enjoyable, I can't in good conscience recommend it.

A detailed, spoiler free description of my experience:

The game started off by immediately throwing me into the action, with a tutorial mission right out of the gate, which was fun and easy to follow. Once that was over, the game prompted me choose a difficulty - Beginner, Experienced, or Expert. As I tend to go for the medium difficulty on first playthroughs, I went for Experienced - but then was warned by the game that this is for people who have played this game before - not just games like it - and if this is my first ever time playing it, the intended first-time experience is to play Beginner. So I thought, fine, I guess they know what they're saying. I'll play beginner.

I'm glad I did, because honestly, I think that otherwise, I would have probably quit halfway through the campaign. You might be thinking "wait, you didn't? You've only played 4 hours" - Yup, that's how long it took to beat the campaign. It's actually extremely short - you have 72 in-world hours before the final mission triggers, and traveling to-and-from missions takes 6-12 hours, so you only get a few of them in before the final mission is forced on you. The missions themselves are very short as well, as they are on a timer and you have a limited number of turns to complete them. As such, I got to see the whole story and finish the game in 1 evening.

Now, the missions themselves...
Here's the thing. The base mechanics, I thought, were mostly great. No dice or random percentages to your attacks, stealth and hacking were interconnected in a cool way that made both mechanics compliment each other, and having to balance speed with stealth was interesting and tension inducing.
But, at every single point, the level design just bugged the hell out of me. Levels are completely randomized - just a set of rooms connected to each other with various guards, cameras, and other devices. One of them has your objective.
Now, unless you've done a certain type of mission before and know what to expect - you don't actually know what your objective is. You're basically playing spies dropped behind enemy lines with 0 intel. What does the objective look like? What general direction is it in? What does it do? The game doesn't tell you this. Going through a level basically just becomes bumbling aimlessly through the building, interacting with everything that is interactable, until one of them suddenly marks the objective as complete.
To make things worse, due to the random nature of the mission layout, the difficulty feels really imbalanced. You might get a level that's very linear, leading you directly to your objective, or you might get one that's a complete maze and you have to guess right. You might find your objective almost immediately and have the exit teleporter right next to it, making the level a joke, or you might have to check every inch before you find it, with enemy security growing on every round, and the exit teleporter is on the furthest possible point from it. Thankfully, on the easiest difficulty, this was always manageable and I never failed a mission - otherwise I probably would have just quit.
The levels also started feeling quite repetitive after a while. Every mission type is exactly the same, really. Bumble around, find the thing, interact with the thing, leave. Sometimes it's a safe, sometimes a computer, sometimes a nano-fabricator, and a bunch of other things. But whatever it is, it all plays exactly the same. It's also worth mentioning that some missions have prerequisites (for example, to get into a safe you need a specific key card you can only get from another mission), but the game doesn't tell you this. You get all the way to the safe and you're like "wait, where the f*ck do I get a key card?"

The rewards for missions don't feel like they really matter that much. You get some money, some gear, some augments. Yeah it buffs your team a little, but it doesn't really feel like you're really making progress. The story, basically, tells you - every time you start a mission, it helps us find our target. It doesn't matter if you finish the mission. Start it and immediately teleport out, and you still progress through the story - because the objectives don't actually matter. That just feels... strange.

The whole story was utterly disappointing, really. The world-building felt lazy, the cyberpunk themes were extremely shallow, the characters were just emotionless talking heads providing you with exposition between missions, and the ending... oof. I rolled my eyes so hard at the ending. Such lazy, generic, formulaic trash. At one point I thought - maybe this isn't the TRUE ending, maybe that's just the "beginner" ending - and this actually sets the starting point for the Experienced campaign. Maybe that's why the game insisted I should play Beginner first. That would have been cool, and I was really hoping that's the case.
Alas, when I tried to start Experienced after finishing it - I realized that's not the case. I'm just supposed to play the exact same thing again, with the exact same story, same mission types, same very short time limit - but this time at a higher difficulty. Unfortunately, I didn't see any reason why I'd want to do that. How can I play through the same story again when I know how terribly it ends? Just for the added challenge? That's not enough to keep me playing. Especially not when the degree of challenge seems to be severely impacted by random factors.

Sadly, while the style is really cool, and the core mechanics are pretty great, I found everything apart from that to be just... bad. I genuinely can't understand how it's so positively reviewed. Maybe I'm missing something - but I honestly just don't get it.

The best Klei game ever made! A stealth turn-based tactical squad roguelike.

Really enjoyed this game, which is why I played for over 300 hours. Each failure made me want to start over. The story was simple but effective. The satisfaction of beating a level without getting seen is like nothing else in gaming.

interesting format, very hard to figure out the route to success. highly recommend

An extremely well made and still (9 years after release) very enjoyable round-based tactics game. The gfx looks still nice and the game still seeks a competitor.

You control some agents with futuristic skills to save your rebel cell from the evil corporations that rule the world. On your side a hacking AI and some wise words from experienced mission control.

The characters have their very distinct loadouts, skills and visuals. After selecting the first two, other come in randomly on missions to free prisoners. Levels are auto-generated in a rogue-like fashion. Things can get harsh on later missions and you really need to learn to use your assets wisely.

After 35hrs I still find it very enjoyable to replay and still there's a lot to achieve.

Fantastic. No random luck, just pure tactics. Love the art style.

Tactical stealth done right. Xcom meets.. uh.. actually I don't know what. There's nothing quite like Invisible Inc.

Criminally underrated rougelite.