Endless Legend 2 is the sequel to Amplitude’s 2014 Endless Legend and the sixth game in the Endless Series after that and two games each in the Space and Dungeon series. Space is Amplitude’s take on a galaxy-scale 4X like Galactic Civilizations and Legend is a high fantasy 4X like Age of Wonders, but using broadly similar mechanics. Both series use the same four primary production resources (FIDS), have tech trees that emphasize unlocking many techs at once, have combat systems that allow the player to take direct control of each battle, and try to make all factions have completely distinct playstyles. Unlike, say, Civilization where most factions in most games can be played in largely the same way, you must take full advantage of your faction’s systems to have any hope of winning even on relatively low difficulties in Endless games.
This is a largely incremental change on Endless Legend. If you’ve played that game, the next paragraph covers what’s common to both titles and can be skipped. The Legend games divide their maps into many large, oddly shaped regions that can only contain one settlement. Whoever settles it first takes control of the entire region and can slowly expand their city district-by-district to cover it. Like Civilization VI, districts are hexes that get bonuses depending on what’s adjacent to them, but unlike any Civ game, expansion is strictly locked within the boundaries of the region. Technologies are unlocked as a pool from each era, so you have a dozen or so techs available to research from Era 1 immediately and will get access to every Era 2 tech simultaneously once you’ve reached a threshold of total known techs. Aside from your Era, the game’s pace is also dictated by a season system that causes a dramatic weather change after a variable and fuzzily-predicted number of turns. Finally, armies consist of a mix of standard units that can be upgraded and hero units that have their own equipment and skill trees. Once you trigger a fight, it plays out like a simple tactics game or can be automated.
Endless Legend II makes a couple of relatively small modifications to those systems. You now expand by having any unit build a camp in a region for a small cost of Influence. The camp claims the territory for you, but has no population and only a limited ability to buy resource extractors. For a larger influence cost, it can be upgraded into a full city or attached to an existing city to expand the build area that city has access to. The weather system now brings a Monsoon instead of winter, which triggers dangerous Doomwraith enemies to spawn but also creates loads of temporary freebie spawns. Most importantly, when the Monsoon ends, the sea recedes, resulting in some regions gaining new land and other regions becoming available for the first time. Since there are no naval units, this can also result in previously isolated empires becoming neighbors. The new territories may contain Dungeons, which are the only notable change to combat. These are basically boss fights that gate settling certain region. They won’t attack on their own, but the region isn’t usable until they’re conquered, and you get a bucket of equipment and resource rewards for doing so. They are often stronger than any army you can reasonably build when they spawn, however, so losing units is almost guaranteed.
I like basically all of these changes in theory, but they have caveats. The Monsoon gradually expanding the map is extremely cool. Requiring multiple steps to found a city helps prevent a mindless rush to expand at the beginning. The dungeon boss fights are a fun way to get the best equipment. That said, the map generation has a tendency to spawn some players on peninsula-like territories that make it easy for them to be sealed off by other empires. If the area you’re stuck in is too small, you’re forced to go to war right away or hope that the Monsoon comes quickly and frees up territory for you. Most other problems stem from the relatively useless strength numbers that you can see for armies. These numbers don’t seem to take unit skills into consideration, and the skills can be both stupidly powerful and buried in tooltips, which means that sometimes you will initiate a battle between two armies of similar power and see in the preview that it’s going to be a bloodbath. This is a particular problem with Doomwraith armies, but it’s also hard to predict the real strength of some dungeon bosses. It’s not helped by battles themselves providing very limited useful information. You can see that a unit has certain statuses and other effects pop up briefly as they occur, but it won’t readily tell you what that means, so it’s hard to plan ahead much. I ended up auto-resolving almost every battle.
Beyond those issues, my other main problem is that the victory conditions feel like they ultimately force you to play one way no matter what you do. There are technically five ways to win, but the score victory has such a long timer that it should almost never happen and the fifth way is simply killing everyone else. Of the remaining three, one requires holding 20 territories and acquiring six Doomwraith units in battle. Another requires having 15 pacified villages in your territories and researching two techs from the last era. The third wants seven specific improvements build and 120 total population. Each also needs you to maintain those conditions for 10 turns in order to win. The problem is that the “have 20 territories”, “have 15 pacified villages”, and “have 120 total population” requirements all end up being close to “have most of the territory” in the end, so playing expansionist is effectively mandatory unless you want to hold out for a score victory. Of the other requirements, acquiring six Doomwraiths seems far easier than reaching the end of the tech tree or building seven of a very expensive wonder, so in my limited experience it felt like that was almost always the path to choose. I don’t think that building tall and narrow is a very viable path to victory unless you’re also aggressively razing other people’s territory, in which case you could have just played wide anyway.
The rest of the game is mostly solid with some minor drawbacks. It looks and sounds great. The narrative system is much stronger than in previous Endless games, but there are too many unimportant quests and too much is repeated if you replay a faction, so you’re going to be skipping a lot. The factions continue to have very distinct mechanics that make them all feel unique, and I particularly liked that there are now Rogue variants of some factions that provide smaller shakeups. That lets you still get a new experience without committing to learning a fully new faction. The UI is beautiful like in every Amplitude game, but they really overdid it with tooltips in this one and it often feels needlessly difficult to find some definitions. In general, a lot of the game feels like it was optimized for someone who already knows it very well and doesn’t need access to explanations of what everything actually does. That’s great once you have that familiarity, but it makes learning much harder than it needs to be. Unfortunately, the tutorial is more of an introductory game and doesn’t explain anything beyond the basic systems.
Conclusion
Overall, Endless Legend 2 is a good game, but one that you’re going to have to commit to in order to really get your money’s worth. If you want to spend hundreds of hours with one 4X and learn every faction in detail, this is probably a dream game, and the DLC I’m sure is coming will only help with that. If you want to play one game every now and then and not memorize what every effect does, however, it’s a harder sell. Factions are different enough that there really is a learning curve with picking up most of them, so you’ll probably need a restart or two in order to really get going, and the game will get repetitive very quickly if you just stick with the same one. There’s also going to be a lot of re-learning if you put the game down and come back in a month since there are so many keywords. If the devs spend a few updates on enhancing the tutorial and making effects easier to parse, I think the game would be in a much better place for people who aren’t looking for a new hobby game. As it is, my score can only go so high.
Rating: 75%
Time to beat: 4-6 hours per game on standard speed if you get one of the early victories. Playing to the score victory probably adds another 2-3 hours, but should be rare.
MSRP: $50, but it had a 50% launch discount and may be available for $25 somewhat frequently. $25 is a much easier sell.
For a similar game, see Civilization VII Review – Not So Lucky Seven
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