![]() It’s not that the various empires don’t feel distinctive or characterful, because they do. If nothing else, Endless Space 2 has at least let me figure out what bugs me about the series. 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. 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. The thing is, something like Civ VI 1 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. ![]() 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. ![]() 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. 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). In particular they share a crucial weak link: the FIDSI system that all of Amplitude’s Endless games are based around. 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. The thing is, nearly all of that was also true of Endless Legend. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. It took me a while to warm up to Endless Space 2. ![]()
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