It took me a while to warm up to Endless Space 2. I regarded the first game as something of a qualified success, but the fantasy followup Endless Legend left me completely cold despite having some ideas and mechanics that were, objectively, very good indeed – it’s the first time ever that I’ve bounced off a game without being able to really explain why, and to start with I was afraid that the same might be true of Endless Space’s sequel. Partially this is because I made the mistake of buying it a week before it came out of Early Access, foolishly assuming (because I’d done the same thing with Battle Brothers and had a whale of a time) that it wouldn’t be too different from the finished article; instead Amplitude released a 3 gigabyte patch on launch day that papered over a lot of the obvious Early Access holes and made it significantly more coherent as an end-to-end experience.

Mostly though — and even after 27 hours playing it, I still think it is a valid criticism — it is because, just like Endless Legend, Endless Space 2 kind of sucks at building the emergent story of your empire’s growth from a single planet to a galaxy-bestriding colossus. This is surprising given the sincere effort both games have made to improve on the comparatively sterile experience of Endless Space by injecting oodles of character into every element of the game; ES 2’s races are fully voiced, have unique techs in the tech tree, narrative questlines that provide some backstory to who they are, and — very importantly — each have at least one gimmick that ensures they play very, very differently, from the nomadic Vodyani who have giant arkships instead of colonies and who must generate new population units by leeching life essence from foreign inhabited systems, to the mechanical Riftborn who build new population in their colony production queue and who can conjure up time-manipulating singularities around systems that provide either a bonus or a malus to any colonies located there. Heroes and leaders have 2D animated portraits, there’s an absolute ton of unique art for improvements, techs and events, Endless Space 2 has taken note of Stellaris’s early game exploration and provides its own stripped-down version where you send scout ships around to explore anomalies and curiosities etc. etc. — there is a lot to like about Endless Space 2, as well as some really good ideas around trade and military that I’ll go into in a second.

The thing is, nearly all of that was also true of Endless Legend. I’m getting on better with Endless Space 2 now since I instinctively prefer the sci-fi setting — and not just on a thematic level, since the standard star-nodes-linked-by-warp-lanes layout that the galaxy map goes for fits the gameplay far better while allowing for plenty of interesting decision space around ship movement — but there’s no getting around the fact that the two games are very similar. In particular they share a crucial weak link: the FIDSI system that all of Amplitude’s Endless games are based around. This will be very similar to anyone who has ever played a 4X before, as it’s shorthand for the usual 4X production of Food, Industry, Dust (money), Science and Influence (culture). The Endless series puts a particular spin on it, however: it puts generation of these resources front and centre and has a ruthless, ruthless emphasis on making them go up. Which is fair enough in a way, since this is the feedback loop at the core of all 4X games: you improve your colonies by building buildings that generate more resources that let you build bigger buildings etc. etc. The thing is, something like Civ VI¹ understands that building a Library should have an impact in the game beyond making a number go up, even if it’s a superficial one. This is why the Civ series is quite big on having your improvements appear on the map and provide some level of interactivity or benefit besides a +20% to colony Industry or a +3 Science per colony population. If you boil a 4X down to a pure numbers game it comes dangerously close to being exposed as the time-wasting End Turn-clickathon these things really are – but this is exactly what the Endless series does, with improvements disappearing into the ether the moment they’re built with the only tangible evidence of their existence being that you’re now producing 10% more Science or whatever.

If nothing else, Endless Space 2 has at least let me figure out what bugs me about the series. It’s not that the various empires don’t feel distinctive or characterful, because they do. They just don’t feel like my empires; whereas most cities or colonies in regular 4Xes end up having a fairly distinct story behind them the only story behind a typical system in Endless Space is that there was colonisable space there and you expanded into it to generate more FIDSI. This is compounded by Amplitude’s love of runaway exponential growth curves and some truly atrociously tuned win conditions. There are six victory types in the game: Conquest (capture all opponent homeworlds), Supremacy (occupy x% of the systems in the game), Science (research the four techs at the very end of each of the categories in the tech tree), Wonder (build X number of special wonder buildings across your colonies), Economic (generate X amount of money during the game) and Score (game ends at turn 200 if no other victory condition is fulfilled). It feels like Conquest and Supremacy are the same thing since you’ll usually end up accidentally doing one while trying to do the other, but otherwise there’s no problem with them; they feel like meaty achievements that have some good narrative moments scattered along the way. Economic, Science and Wonder victories are horribly broken right now, however, as they’re all expressions of how good your empire is at generating at FIDSI — and thanks to some extremely poor balancing it’s very, very easy to thoroughly break your FIDSI output so that you’ll achieve any one of these conditions about 10-15 turns after deciding to go for it. Economic victories in particular are really bad because you can break your Dust generation so hard with the trade system you’ll win by Economy every time unless you turn that victory type off.

(This is how broken Dust generation is in Endless Space 2 right now: there are achievements for generating 1 million, 2 million and 4 million total Dust across any number of playthroughs, the implication being that this should take some considerable time to do. I got all of them in a single game when I turned off the Economic victory condition that was capping my Dust gathering.)

Anyway, the ease with which you can win means games of Endless Space 2 end extremely abruptly. Fighting wars is the best way to generate your own narrative here, but it’s very difficult to kill off more than one race before you win by other means. The fact that none of the non-war victory conditions are particularly interactive compounds the problem: the Economic and Science victory conditions are literally “Get X amount of Science/Dust to win”, while the Wonder victory condition has a little more nuance to it but boils down to having Y number of colonies with good Industry output, where Y is the number of wonders required to win. It’s all rather unsatisfying to interact with, and feels more like you deciding to end the game because you filled out the tech tree and built all the improvements than it does a real, earned victory.

But what about the quests, I hear you say? Surely it shouldn’t be hard to tell a story if there is an actual story written into the game? Well, that’s what you’d think, but it turns out the quests are just as poorly balanced as the rest of it. It’s the same problem Endless Legend had, where quest objectives are spawned on the other side of the map past three hostile empires and you just don’t bother with them — and when you do your reward is 50 of a resource that you’ve already stockpiled 1000 of, or 1000 Dust at a time when your empire is generating 50k per turn, or a shield module for your ships that’s somehow worse than the bog-standard tier 1 shield you researched 70 turns ago. Even within individual quest chains there’s extremely poor balance: one example for the United Empire asks you to pass 4 Industrialist laws, which requires you to tech down to tier 4 of the Empire category of technologies to get the required number of law slots. This takes about 50 turns of buildup, and then the next three stages of the quest have laughable requirements like “Have a colony that generates 200 Science per turn” when the techs required to fulfil the previous condition collectively cost a total of 100,000 Science. It’s really uneven and incoherent, and that’s the last thing any kind of narrative should be.

It’s not all bad news, though. In fact Endless Space 2 is far from it. Despite all of that bitching, and despite my fundamental feeling that this is more a game about how thoroughly you can break your economy than it is building a space empire, there’s a lot of cool systems in Endless Space 2. When I’m thinking of actual individual parts of the game such as the space battles I have nothing but good thoughts; there’s a lot of interesting mechanics to get your teeth into, while most of the boring faff that infests 4Xes has been shooed away. Take planetary invasions, which I mentioned earlier; something like Stellaris has you actively recruiting armies from your population, loading them onto troop transports, bussing them over to the target system, unloading them so that they can fight the invasion, and then loading the survivors back onto the transport after the planet has been pacified so that they can hike to the next one. That’s a lot of incredibly tedious micromanagement that Endless Space 2 has simply abstracted away with its Manpower mechanic. A certain percentage of your Food output is converted to Manpower each turn; this fills a Manpower pool up to a cap that you can raise with techs. Manpower is spent in automatically filling up planet garrisons and — this is the important part — in building all of your ships, since every ship your build now has a default complement of troops, and it’s these that are used for planetary invasions. Once your battle fleet has disposed of any opposition in space, it can then immediately drop its troop complement onto the planet surface to duke it out with the planetary garrison: it’s your fleet Manpower strength (which can be boosted by having more ships or ships with special troop modules) versus their Planetary garrison Manpower strength (which can be boosted with improvements). There is nuance to be found in invasions, but it’s found either on the macro empire level (where you can set your empire-wide troop balance between Infantry, Armour and Air units) or the broad battle tactics you and your opponent use for the invasion. Troop management itself has been removed from the equation entirely; once an invasion has been won or lost you simply pull your fleet back to a friendly system for a turn to replenish any spent Manpower strength.

Trade networks are another area where Endless Space meets with success through abstraction, although it’s a more qualified example than planetary invasions since they’re also the primary reason why Dust generation is so broken right now. At some point in the early midgame you get a tech that lets you build a Trading Company HQ in one of your systems. Once the HQ is built, you can then build a Trading Company subsidiary in another one of your systems. When both the HQ and the subsidiary are built, trade will automatically start between the two with no further input required from you; this brings in both Dust and a smaller amount of Science, but it also does the following:

• Starts levelling up the trading company whose HQ you just built. The more levels it has, the better it is at making money.
• Starts filling up an unlock bar for your second trading company. Once it’s full you can build another HQ, and another subsidiary. However, once both of these have been built Trading Company HQ 1 will be able to trade with both subsidiary 1 and subsidiary 2, and the same is true with HQ 2.

You can have up to 5 Trading Company HQs in your empire, and the implications of this should be clear when taken with the second point above: the base number of trade routes you can support is the square of the total HQ + subsidiary pairs that you have, making it a system with a literally exponential increase in effectiveness. There are additional system improvements you can build that increase a system’s Trade Value, and you can also sign Trade Agreements with other empires that give you access to their Trading Subsidiaries (and vice versa), and if you stack all of this stuff you can make your trade network an incredibly broken thing; it’s not that it generates more Dust than you can spend as there’s a hidden inflation mechanic that increases Dust buyout prices along with your income, but the problem with it is that an endgame trade network will be generating nearly twice the amount of Science as all of your colonies put together. It’ll need a couple of balancing passes to fix it up so that it’s a bonus worth going for rather than the driving force behind an endgame empire’s research, but I really like the base mechanic since at no point does Endless Space 2 have me manually faffing around with individual trade route destinations (Firaxis should really be taking notes here); it just wants me to set my hub systems and my spoke systems and then does the rest for me.

Wherever you look in Endless Space 2 it’s pretty much the same story. Very few of the mechanics present are new or innovative, but they’ve been built in a way that makes them far more pleasant to deal with than previous examples I’ve encountered. An interesting thing about Endless Space 2 is that Amplitude have clearly looked at Stellaris, swiped a couple of the mechanics (exploration and population politics) and implemented them in a much more 4X-y way – and they work a lot better for it. Exploration is based around sending scout ships to explore curiosity sites with probes; it’s a one-click process that’ll yield anything from special ship modules to planet anomalies to triggering new questlines, and while it’s less involved than Stellaris’s elaborate event chains it’s a much nicer system mechanically. Politics are a little more impenetrable — I’m not sure where the actual decision space around the political system lies beyond “Push button to influence the election to get the party you want elected”, but then I couldn’t see any depth in Stellaris’s far more detailed system either and here it’s at least a nice bit of flavour with a moderate impact on the game, as each party has its own set of laws that you can enact to provide empire-wide bonuses. The interactivity has been stripped out of space battles entirely but the depth of the mechanics has nevertheless been widened slightly – the outcome is now 100% dependent on your ship configuration and the tactic card you choose going in, which influences the range your ships will engage at. This makes ship design somewhat more thoughtful as it’s here that your battles are now won or lost, as you build ships that can make use of particular tactics cards to counter a known enemy ship design. Diplomacy has some weaknesses — I can never tell exactly what is causing an empire to hate me — but they at least give you plenty of warning before declaring war, and there’s a pseudo-warscore system in place that’ll let you — or them — dictate the terms of any peace. It certainly works a damn sight better than certain recent examples to be found in games whose names rhyme with “Spivilization”.

There’s a lot to like in Endless Space 2. Notably it’s the first 4X I’ve played in a while that I’ve had genuine fun playing — not qualified fun, not fun despite bugs or poor balance or a psychotic, broken AI, but actual moments of unalloyed delight. However, this is because I’m of a certain mindset; I enjoyed pulling apart Endless Space 2’s changes and additions and seeing what made it tick as there’s an above-average quantity of excellent design in here. The flipside is that that design is paired with some absolutely awful narrative and balance problems that cripple any long-term pull the game might have (as the current winning strategy is to build a trading network — not to optimise it, but simply to have it), and while Amplitude will probably fix them in the near future I’m getting a little tired of giving 4X games a pass on balance issues that are bloody obvious for anyone willing to spend a weekend playing the thing; since this is a genre that’s supposed to support hundreds of hours of repeated playthroughs that’s a shortcoming that I’m no longer inclined to ignore. So nice try, Amplitude; I liked this one better than your previous effort and I feel much more open to revisiting it in the future than I do Stellaris or Civ VI, but you’ve still got a long way to go before you properly nail it.

The post Thoughts: Endless Space 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Chances are that if you load up a review of Dungeon of the Endless — any review, doesn’t really matter which one — you will see, at some point, the words “tower defence” and “roguelike” in very close proximity to one another¹. This is partially a reflection of DotE’s refusal to be pigeonholed; while it does indeed smoosh together some elements from both genres (you build towers to hold off waves of advancing baddies, but you also have a party of four characters who you outfit in looted equipment and level up as the dungeon progresses) into a single game, it also has some very interesting mechanics that have nothing to do with it being either a tower defence or a roguelike, and which can only be found in DotE. That it’s picked up those labels in spite of its unique qualities indicates that it’s been pigeonholed nevertheless, however, and I think that to describe it as a “roguelike tower defence” could end up misleading people. I certainly bounced off the surface the first time I played it because it wasn’t what I’d been led to expect – playing it like a roguelike simply didn’t work, and it didn’t seem quite tower-defencey enough (you start off with a grand total of one offensive tower, which doesn’t exactly promote strategy) to engage the strategy part  of my brain. It wasn’t until I gave it a second chance after Christmas and accepted it on its own merits — rather than cramming it into a niche where it didn’t fit — that Dungeon of the Endless really clicked for me.

I’d like to tell you that it was a Damascene conversion and that Dungeon of the Endless is the best not-tower defence game since the first Defence Grid, but I would be lying. DotE is a smart, well-made game that still ended up underwhelming me slightly in spite of its quality and its cleverness. We’ll get to the reasons for that at the end of the review, but in the meantime it’s important to remember that DotE does a hell of a lot right. The basic setup available to first-time players of the game (you can unlock more game customisation options later on) starts you out with a party of two heroes out of a possible four. The heroes begin in a room with your all-important power crystal; the room will have one or more doors that you can open to reveal another room beyond, and this unexplored room can contain anything from monsters to resources to additional heroes you can recruit into your party. Usually it’s monsters, and your heroes will deal with them in a very hands-off fashion: your only control over them is telling them which room to go to, and if they happen to be sharing said room with monsters they’ll engage in combat with them automatically.

This was what threw me the first time I played the game; I’d gone in expecting it to be heavier on the roguelike side, but the heroes in DotE are much more like powerful mobile turrets than they are traditional roguelike characters — you’re concerned with their strategic placement on the map, not their second-by-second involvement in a scrap. Nonetheless there is plenty of variation amongst the pool of twenty-odd heroes you can eventually unlock, from slow, heavy machinegunners capable of holding back entire waves by themselves to quick, light melee characters who get torn apart if you let them get swarmed, but who are capable of responding quickly to unexpected monster incursions and who often have additional passive abilities to make up for it. Each hero has their own art, animations and a written biography that you’ll never ever read — their visual characterisation is good enough that you don’t even need to learn their names beyond Orange Space Marine Lady, Horse-Face Halberdier, Robot Knight etc. etc. — and watching them sprint/lumber around the map is one of the highlights of DotE because of the effort that’s gone into making each of them move differently and interestingly.  They also eventually unlock a pair of special abilities you can use to turn overwhelming odds in your favour; while I found these a bit fiddly to utilise in the heat of the moment, they’re certainly powerful and definitely worth using.

Anyway, those are the heroes. The monsters they fight are rendered in a similarly charming fashion, and have a chance of spawning in areas that you can’t directly see whenever you open a door leading to a new room. Opening a door effectively counts as a turn in DotE; as long as you’re not exploring new territory monsters will never spawn and you can arrange heroes and build turrets to your heart’s content, but as soon as you crack open a door it’s time to batten down the hatches and await the inevitable onslaught.  Each monster type has different behaviour — some will go for your heroes, some target turrets and resource modules, and a few of them will even beeline straight for your power crystal and attempt to smash it to bits, which is really bad for you and why it’s very important to open doors in such a way that any monsters that spawn are funneled through your fiendish network of defence turrets and (hopefully) get shot to pieces in the process.

So far, so tower defence. Sprinkling the roguelike mechanic of dungeon exploration on top doesn’t do much to change the basic formula — you’re still stacking turrets and managing monster paths, just like you do in Defence Grid.  No, if you ask me the clever thing DotE does isn’t that it introduces some roguelike exploration elements to the game, but that it mixes in its own unique power mechanic at the same time. The power mechanic works like this: roughly every other room you open will yield a certain amount of Dust (in this case a fancy word for “electricity”). Every ten Dust you accumulate allows you to power an additional room. You get vision on powered rooms (meaning monsters can’t spawn in them), and you can also build turrets in them, and so selectively powering up rooms allows you to control which direction the monsters come from — if you’ve fully explored one area of the map it’s usually a good idea to power up that whole section if you can, so that you don’t have to worry about monsters spawning behind you while you explore the rest of it. The catch is that all of your power emanates from your power crystal, so in order to power a room at the far end of the dungeon you have to have enough Dust to also power an unbroken series of rooms between it and the crystal room. Dust is scarce enough that you can almost never power enough rooms to create an ideal defensive layout, and so there’s an ever-present element of compromise to the placement of your heroes and turrets; every room that you can’t see can spawn a wave of monsters, and so you have to both create defensive strongpoints that can hold back monster attacks as well as ensuring you have enough vision – either through hero placement or by powering rooms — that the monsters never reach the critical mass required to overrun your turrets.

It also adds a risk-reward element to unlocking new rooms. Because only some rooms give Dust – and no room will give enough Dust to power itself — opening up too many doors will change the map layout into something that’s very, very difficult to defend with the limited amount of power available. At the same time the avowed goal of the level is to find the exit elevator so that you can drag your power crystal to it and travel to the next floor, so you have to do at least some exploration. Because opening each door is a turn, the more doors you open, the more resources you’ll gather from your resource modules, the more turrets you’ll be able to build, and the more you’ll be able to level up your heroes with food. Because you start each level with just the resources left over from the last one, if you beeline straight for the exit every time it’s unlikely you’ll take enough resources into the next level to get a proper foothold there. Opening doors is both necessary and useful, then, but while it’s sometimes a no-brainer to do it it’s usually accompanied by a feeling that you’re about to overextend – badly.

It’s this constant sense of danger and the tradeoff between getting more stuff and potentially screwing yourself over that turns DotE into a one of the more thoughtful games I’ve played in the last year. The turret construction itself has been ripped wholesale out of Generic Tower Defence Game #106 – you’ve got your rapid fire low damage turrets, and your slow-firing high damage turrets, and your turrets that damage groups, and your turrets that lower defense and do damage over time, turrets that buff heroes, turrets that slow down monsters for other turrets to shoot — basically nothing that I haven’t seen at least a dozen times before in games that did it better, especially since the turrets all have “hilarious” pun-based names and descriptions that leave you none the wiser as to what they actually do. The other roguelike elements – the item system and the hero permadeath — feel similarly rote; the impact of losing a hero is somewhat lessened when you have a better than even chance of being able to recruit a new one on the next level, although they might not fit that well into your group. This is why I say that it’s not the mere fact that DotE fused tower defence and roguelikes that makes it good, it’s what it does to build on top of that with the map exploration and the power mechanic that makes it worth playing once.

Probably not more than once, however. I’ve spent six hours with Dungeon of the Endless, most of which was made up of two games. In one game I got to within two levels of the exit, only for an awful UI design “feature” to fuck me over: as previously mentioned, when you find the exit elevator you have to drag the power crystal to it while an unending horde of monsters assaults your crumbling defences. I had three of my heroes playing rearguard while the crystal carrier slogged his way to the elevator; seeing that he was about to reach his destination I moved to select my other heroes so that I could get them the hell out of there — only for the game to pop up the “PUSH TO LEAVE LEVEL” button right on top of my party just as I was clicking on them. Once you push the button any heroes who aren’t on the elevator get left behind, and there’s no confirmation dialogue to make sure that this potentially game-ruining action is something the player actually wants to do, so what happened here was that I lost three of my four heroes and couldn’t continue the run. Exactly why Amplitude think it’s a good idea to suddenly materialise this button anywhere near the play area – rather than, I don’t know, one of the corners of the screen where the player is unlikely to be clicking their mouse in the regular course of playing the fucking game — I do not know, but it pissed away two and a half hours of my time and caused me to ragequit for a couple of days before I felt like coming back to it.

Once I did, though, I managed to make it all the way to the end on the next run without feeling particularly pressured; I’d figured out the game, and while it required some brainpower to spin all the plates DotE had given me it was only really a game-ruining misstep like the one mentioned above that could stop me from finishing it once I’d built up some momentum. And this is where I ran into Dungeon of the Endless’s big problem: despite a number of mutators you can employ to change up subsequent runs, I feel like it has almost no replay value (and I did try). One run seems largely identical to the next, and there isn’t enough variety in the enemies or the dungeon environment to sustain long-term play. The very best roguelikes maintain an almost gambling-like thrill through hundreds of sessions as you never quite know what you’re going to encounter on each playthrough, but while DotE does have that risk-reward thing of opening new rooms to progress the actual contents of the rooms are depressingly dull — oh, it’s a machine that yields 17 food, whoop de doo. Having completed it once I found that I wasn’t particularly interested in doing it again with a mutator that gave me strong heroes who couldn’t heal themselves; that might have changed my approach somewhat, but it didn’t feel like a very interesting challenge to me, and certainly not interesting enough to justify investing another three hours into a third playthrough. That’s not exactly a black mark against Dungeon of the Endless; despite enjoying the genre I can’t name a single other tower defence game I’ve played through more than once, so it is at least in good company. At the same time, though, it does have all this stuff that’s explicitly geared towards making it more replayable than its peers, and it just doesn’t hook me in the way that it should.. Dungeon of the Endless is a good game on its own merits, but there’s no getting away from the fact that if I hadn’t been screwed over on that first run I would have finished it after four hours, not six, and even at six I came away with a slightly disappointed feeling that it was over too soon.

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The post Thoughts: Dungeon of the Endless appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Endless Legend is the fantasy-themed followup to 2012′s Endless Space, a space-based 4X that I quite liked, on the whole, but which had a whole mess of technical and stylistic issues. Endless Space was an obvious attempt to produce a worthy successor to Master of Orion, and so while this particular gap in the market got filled quite ably by Age of Wonders III earlier this year it would have been logical for Endless Legend to take a swing at modernising Master of Magic. This is why I was more than a bit surprised that under the fantasy trappings Endless Legend was much more of a traditional 4X in the vein of Civilization; it uses the fantasy¹ elements as flavour and does deviate from formula when it comes to factions and cities, but there are several key elements that distinguish MoM-alikes from the wider 4X genre that are consciously missing from Endless Legend.

While this wasn’t what I was expecting, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. At its core it might be much more conventional than its appearance would suggest, but most of what Endless Legend does attempt it ends up executing more or less competently, and there’s something to be said for knowing your limitations. I did miss spellcrafting and the ability to terraform the landscape, both of which are hallmarks of the MoM-alike; however, while I do think they would have added some much-needed spice to the game they’re not essential for Endless Legend to work. And Endless Legend does work, god help me. I have played one and a half games of it and I have at times experienced something approximating fun, which is more than Legendary Heroes managed. There is a solid game somewhere in here, one which can quite capably engage the same parts of the brain that Civilization does.

But if that’s the case, then why do I feel so underwhelmed?

Well, that’s not quite a mystery. I can point to several areas where I feel Endless Legend falls short, and I’ll do just that in a moment or two. Ultimately, though, I feel that its utter failure to leave any impression on me was down to a fundamental incompatability between myself and the game. I’ve played it for ten hours and come away nonplussed. On the other hand I have a friend (hi Jim) who doesn’t usually go in for this style of game but who has played it for nearly forty hours now, so I’m forced to conclude that there must be something in it that I’m just not seeing, and that elements of the game that I felt misfired badly were finding the mark for other people. It’s unusual that I come to this conclusion – last time was Brave New World over a year ago — but it might be the case that Endless Legend just isn’t for me, and that everything I’m about to castigate sounds like your idea of a great time.

So! Despite being a firmly ground-based counterpart to Endless Space, and despite the developers obviously taking criticism of that first game to heart when putting it together, Endless Legend still ends up falling into the same sterile and lifeless trap its predecessor did. This is weird because it is trying its best not to and does a lot of things right when attempting to inject the various factions in the game with some aspect of personality; each faction has distinct city styles which mark them out as different, their racial units are constantly visible on the map rather than being packed inside a tiny hologram of a ship, and Amplitude have also gone to the trouble of putting in some animated leader screens that aren’t completely terrible. This gets Endless Legend part of the way in that you’re no longer dealing with some faceless hologram robots, but rather those orange elvish dickbags who have built a continent-spanning empire that’s half again as big as yours and are nipping at your heels as you grind your way slowly towards a science victory. It does enough to support that sort of anthropomorphic projection onto what is ultimately an unfeeling collection of numbers; however, it doesn’t go nearly far enough in lacing these elements of personality throughout the structure of the game in the way that the truly successful 4Xs like Civilization and Age of Wonders III manage so effortlessly.

I’ll try to keep the Age of Wonders III comparisons to a minimum because — despite appearances — Endless Legend isn’t really challenging for the same crown, but AoW III does provide the best analogue for an area where I think Endless Legend really does fall down: its heroes and unit editor. An army composed of units that gain experience and new equipment over the course of the game is a great opportunity to let the player tell their own story; in the case of Endless Legend in particular they’re the most direct personification of the player’s empire present on the world map, and if it had played its cards right it could have built a system to rival AoW III’s ghost armies and orc musketeers. Instead the unit editor is almost criminally dull; you can upgrade and tinker with armour, weapons, shields and trinkets, but only the weapons will change the appearance of the unit — and often that means just switching the colour of a sword from grey to red.  There’s only three or four unit types per empire (falling into the rough brackets of infantry, support, cavalry and heavy) and so even with the presence of minor races who you can gradually assimilate into your empire and field as special units I really think Endless Legend could have made more of an effort here. Sadly it prefers to make a barely-disguised carbon copy of the fleet system from Endless Space, where you don’t get the opportunity to rename new variants of a unit but must instead wince through a glorious army of ORC 4, STALWART 3 and BISHOP 5 marching  out to repel an enemy siege. The AI suffers from the same limitation and is still very spammy with its units to boot; I don’t even have the words to describe how disheartening it is to face the fourth enemy army composed of six units of RANGER 17.

Unit upgrades at least make the numbers attached to that unit go up, but for a game whose predecessor basically sold itself on its clean, efficient UI Endless Legend is really, really disinterested in telling you what those numbers mean. So you’ll be browsing through equipment, and you’ll see that this sword increases lightning bolt by five, whereas this hammer gives you plus ten to explosion. What do these mean? I don’t know, because there’s no tooltips to explain these symbols when you’re in the unit designer; it’s only once you’ve exited into the general unit viewer that it’ll tell you what all the skills and traits are. Not that it’ll leave you any the wiser in the game’s turn-based combat segments, which is a confusing mess of directional markers and action symbols that appear seemingly at random. That spider thing did something to that other spider thing! I have absolutely no idea what it was, but it doesn’t seem to stop it from being riddled with all these arrows I’m firing at it. Endless Legend could have the most elaborately-tuned combat system in the world and I wouldn’t have a clue it existed because as far as I can tell I’m just hitting my enemies with swords and watching them die while all this other inconsequential shit happens in the background.

(I did like that armies phyiscally battled it out on the empire map rather than the action transitioning to a separate sub-map. When two armies run into each other they get a roughly ten hex by ten hex slice of the surrounding environment to fight over, with movement rates being vastly increased to ensure the combat can successfully resolve in the six-turn time limit. This made picking and choosing battlefields very important, and more than once I had what should have been a routine stomp of an AI army turned into something of a bloodbath because I was forced to fight through a bottleneck that completely eliminated my numerical advantage.)

So I felt the armies and the combat side of things was more than a bit of a bust. Fortunately the same can’t quite be said of Endless Legend’s empire management, which has its problems but which is where most of the good in the game is to be found. Endless Legend also imports Endless Space’s resource system, where Science is a resource to be extracted out of tiles and there’s no such thing as useless terrain; even arid desert is useful because desert tiles give you lots of money, even if they give you sod all else. It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense that this frozen tundra is so much better at generating science than the grassy flatlands five hexes away, but it avoids the classic 4X problem of spawning on endless plains and snow tiles; no matter where you settle you’ll get something useful out of the surrounding environment, and it’s just a matter of positioning your cities intelligently so that you get the most out of the terrain.

Said city positioning is probably the most interesting thing Endless Legend does. Unlike most 4X games where you can settle wherever the hell you feel like, the map in Endless Legend is divided up into randomly-generated territories and there’s a hard limit of one city allowed per territory. This isn’t just a solution to Infinite City Sprawl, but it’s required for cities to have enough room to make the most of Endless Legend’s city growth mechanic. When you found a city you get lots of resources from the central city tile, plus a somewhat lesser amount of resources from each of the six hexes surrounding it (which is represented by a nice farm graphic). These resources are gathered automatically and you don’t need population to do it, although they do provide bonus resources on top of what you get out of the city tiles. However, a city’s population count does have a big indirect effect on the quantity of resources you can harvest from a city’s surrounding environs, since for every two population your city has after the first you get to built a City Streets tile improvement. This is essentially another city tile just like the first one, and it’ll boost your resource yield from that tile. More than that, though, this second city tile will also gather a reduced amount of resources from the surrounding hexes. One City Streets tile can potentially get you three tiles’ worth of resources if you place it correctly, and so city growth becomes a matter of planning your city’s expansion in such a way that you maximise your resource yield through intelligent placement of the City Streets expansions.

I thought this was a great mechanic. It felt fresh and powerful and a much more interesting choice than the simple population placement seen in Civ, especially since each basic City Streets expansion lowers your city happiness by ten. If  a City Streets tile is adjacent to four other City Streets tiles it levels up and that happiness penalty flips around to become a +15 bonus to happiness, but because you’ve tightly clustered your City Streets tiles to do this you haven’t maximised your resource yield. This makes city expansion something of a balancing act as you also have to build it in such a way that you don’t tip your city over into unhappiness, which will result in a big hit to production and gold income. It’s a pleasing conundrum, and also does what the rest of Endless Legend fails to do: because each city eventually grows to be unique, they feel much more like actual places than they do simple resource nodes to be exploited. Sadly it didn’t turn out to be quite as good in execution as it seemed in concept since this system means you can get far more out of plowing all of your resources into a single city than you can by expanding into new territories, which in turn made certain factions outright broken (such as the aptly-named Broken Lords, who buy new population with gold instead of breeding them with food and can grow their cities shockingly quickly as a result), but I appreciated the attempt and I’m not unconvinced it could work with a bit of tinkering.

The rest of Endless Legend is shockingly conventional; if you’ve played any of the Civilizations there’ll be little else in the game that will actually surprise you. As previously stated there’s no actual magic or terraforming to spice things up, and winning the game is the stock tedium of either conquering the world (yawn) or amassing money (double yawn) or researching all the big end game techs (by which point I am approaching cataplexy).  There’s narrative questlines for each faction but they seem poorly thought out since they eventually require you to make war against the other factions — that’s not a quest objective, that’s winning the sodding game repackaged in a slightly different format. I’ve seen a lot of people say they’ve fallen in love with the art style and even I’ll admit it’s certainly distinctive, but the problem with everything looking like a model is that it exacerbates the whole lifelessness thing Endless Legend suffers from.

And that’s the killer issue, for me. I played one full game of Broken Legend. I admired the bits that worked. I got frustrated by the bits that didn’t. I eventually won, although it was a damn close thing. Having done that, though, I find that despite the improvements over Endless Space the world of Endless Legend has still failed to make me give even the tiniest iota of a shit about it. Maybe I just have different priorities when I play a 4X, but I put a much higher priority on how the game feels and how well I can construct my own personal narrative out of it than I do any mechanical excellence, and while Endless Legend shows flashes of the latter it has singularly failed to arouse my interest to a sufficient degree for me to see a second game all the way through to the end. To me, it’s an almost perfectly forgettable game. Perhaps that’s unfair on Endless Legend; a not-sufficiently-gripping setting isn’t something people usually pillory a 4X for. I’m not most people, however, and so all I can say is that despite its gameplay being quite good in parts and inoffensive at worst, I really didn’t get on with it.

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