Endless Legend (2014)

Review based on single play through as the Vaulters.

So I played this in a sequence of new-to-me strategy games - Stellaris, Civ 6 and EL so far. At first I struggled. It takes a while to understand how the game works. In some ways I found it harder than Stellaris because I made some assumptions based on Civ games which led me astray.

Midgame, though, I really started to enjoy it. Ther are a few things I really liked:

• One city per region makes the whole process of deciding where to place cities more interesting but less free-form than in Civ 6
• The UI is just so much cleaner and more functional than Civ 6. Civ really needs a cities overview screen like EL instead of its useless "City Report"
• Once I got to grips with the open-ended research system it offered much more flexibility than Civ
• Factions are very distinct and impact play-style a lot
• The map is really beautiful and very functional - easy to see resources, anomalies etc
• The resource-extraction mechanism if well implemented
• Quests add a bit of variety and direction, in a similar way to Stellaris.

A few things were less appealing:

• Tactical combat is too slow and I ended up automating battles 99% of the time
• There's some sense of progression through tech but it's mostly passive boosters
• Likewise units - every now and again I'd make a new set of units but they just felt like the originals but stronger
• There is a lot of potential variety in the units (ranged, melee, flying, disease, retaliation etc. but because the tactical battles are a pain this didn't really come through

Overall, for a single play-through Civ is probably more accessible, more balanced and more satisfying but EL has way more replayability and I think it's the game I'd come back to.

A review for new players to the genre. Veterans move along.

Not a welcoming type of game for an unexperienced player.

There is no campaign and the motivation to play is already blocked by by the first screen asking to choose random parameters, like its the most obvious thing to do. Again, not newbie friendly.

Difficulty is unbalanced with sudden attacks from enemy factions that react based on your status. A status that needs to be constantly monitored via boring spreadsheets and graphs.

Combat is as basic as it gets. Slow, simply animated, with barebone sound effects. Character movement on map is poorly animated and choppy.

Expanding cities and creating troops takes way too many turns and it feels like a slog. Loosing troops in battle is a major setback, especially while scouting. Production can be sped up with a buyout in gold and depending on the faction choosed its not always a viable option.

In the end a boring, tedious and simply not fun experience.

So, you're probably wondering - if this game is so tedious, why give it 4 out of 5 stars? Well, i couldn't come up with something better to put after Endless, so there.

User Interface

Endless Legend suffers from the same main problem as Endless Space and Dungeon of the Endless; The UI is terrible.

• You can't click on a unit to find out what its plethora of abilities do, you have to go into unit construction to actually read that.
• The same goes for minor races. You have to go to the damn wiki (no in-game encyclopedia) to find out what bonus/unit they give.
• Most of the game revolves around constructing things, which are all cramped into the same tiny, shitty menu.
• You have to switch around the population in all of your cities every single turn but selecting a "pop" and hovering over a category does not display its effect so you're often dragging pops back and forth.
• Boosters can only be activated one at the time, lavaformers are even worse because they require several clicks each time.
• Et cetera.

Repeated Mistakes

Also like Endless Space, the combat is shit. You can actually play a turn-based fight on a hexgrid, but you can only assign movement and targets at the start of each round. It's tedious and boring and doesn't work like you want to half of the time.

Another thing copied from Endless Space is the "identical tech tree for each race". It's better executed and less linear here but it lacks much of the character. Many races in ES had their own or modfied technologies, those are more rare here.

Other Stuff

Along with the lack of quest variety, the tech tree makes games feel a bit too alike. Your race may play in a vastly different way, but you're still researching "generic tech" while doing "generic quest". Add the terribly tedious pop juggling and longer games or big maps just aren't as fun they were in Endless Space.

Other complaints include the "start of the turn rush" where you sometimes have to reload because the AI moves before you do. Not being able to retreat from combat when attacked in an ocean you control is bizarre too. Oh, and the map sucks. It's so full of stuff that you can hardly tell what is where sometimes. This is even worse during the new sandstorms, which put fancy auroras on the screen making it harder to see everything.

Oh yeah, and it's too random in everything. A bad starting location can hurt you even more than in Endless Space.

The Good Stuff

Despite all that, Endless Legend is a good game. The lore is amazing. The various races are really very different from each other. And the AI is solid, if a bit too strong on Normal (may have been bad luck on my part).

Sometimes i would get frustrated with the UI or a poorly implemented quest, but i would always come back and play for a few more hours. It's fun to spar over territory. The stories of the various races and the planet itself are actually interesting. And it's really enjoyable to try a new race and learn how it "works".

I really hope they learn from their mistakes when they make Endless Legend 2. Fix the UI, make combat fun and personally research trees - that'd be enough.