Edit: I happened to glance at my site analytics and this post has picked up a staggering 1300 views over the last week, which mostly seem to be driven by people typing “Endless Space review” into search engines and getting this as one of the first links. Firstly, to anyone finding this post subsequent to this edit, hello! Secondly, this is not a review of Endless Space because Endless Space is still in an alpha state. However, what I’ve written here should hopefully give you a good idea of what that alpha is like and inform your subsequent decision to purchase the game accordingly.
When the advert for Endless Space popped up on my Steam display yesterday evening I didn’t give it much thought. There’s dozens of awful knockoff spacesims being released on Steam every month (while Valve happily reject other, proven genres WHERE ARE MY PINBALL GAMES YOU BASTARDS) and Endless Space didn’t do a whole lot to stand out from the crowd. Generic sounding name, generic looking ships, and the ad didn’t tell me a lot about what ES was actually about. I can’t remember what it was that eventually led me to the game’s store page, but that I ended up there at all was very much against the odds. It’s a good thing I did, though, because in amongst all the obligatory babbling about the intricacies of the sci-fi world the developers have come up, I caught a glimpse of this screenshot of the research tree.