There’s no other strategy series that blends immersion with gameplay as well as Amplitude’s Endless games. They’ve got it all - a deep narrative driven by a shared universe, thrilling asymmetric factions, and a campaign that feels just as much like an RPG as it does a 4X title. Endless Legend 2 carries on that tradition, breaking new ground while staying true to the elements that have made the franchise what it is today.
I played a demo build of the game, featuring a shortened mini-campaign with two playable factions, both new to Endless Legend. As a longtime Endless fan, much of EL2 felt instantly familiar; founding and growing cities, integrating Minor Factions, and exploring the map with heroes and armies were all second nature after hundreds of hours in the original. Of course, that made the changes, and what they mean for the game overall, stand out immediately.
Welcome To Saiadha
Endless Legend’s original setting, the planet of Auriga, is still a lifeless frozen rock after the events of the first game. We revisited it briefly in Endless Space 2 as part of the Vaulters’ storyline, but Auriga’s story, for the time being, is over. Endless Legend 2 takes place on a new world in the Endless Universe, the ocean planet of Saiadha.
Auriga’s harsh winters, which forced players to tighten their belts and slowed army movement to a crawl in the original, are replaced with Saiadha’s monsoon season. As they are currently, the monsoons feel more like a buff than a penalty; armies regenerate faster while outside of friendly territory in the rains, and rewards from combat are doubled. Meanwhile, Minor Factions become more aggressive.
The monsoons seem designed to encourage more proactive gameplay; even if you’re playing the defense-oriented Kin of Sheredyn, it pays to get out there and fight some wars while it’s raining. If you don’t, someone else will.
Monsoons also serve as a calendar in-game. Each season, you get a free opportunity to reassign your Council, the characters who sit in power within your faction’s government. Perhaps more importantly, in the early game at least, after each monsoon, the ocean waters recede, revealing more landmasses to explore. Gating exploration like this is a neat way to add an extra element of discovery to the game, and may even help prevent early rushes in multiplayer.
Endless Cities
Endless Legend’s system of sprawling cities covering the land via Districts remains intact, though their growth seems slower this time around. Instead of building new Districts via Industry, you first purchase new tiles with Influence. These ‘Foundations’ exploit the natural tile resources underneath them, and can be improved with proper specialized Districts similar to those found in Humankind.
EL2 has also borrowed another of Humankind’s city-building mechanics, the ability to attach nearby territories to cities rather than growing them into poleis in their own right. This is cheaper and helps to contribute to a city from a territory that might not be worth fully developing.
The end result is that overall growth and expansion are a bit slower at first, forcing you to be more intentional with your choices. That goes double for how you spend your Influence, which is hard to come by early on unless you get very lucky with Anomalies. It’s a nice change of pace from the original game, where Influence tended to pile up at first, until you started engaging in real diplomacy with other factions.
New Faces
Of course, the standout feature of both Endless Legend and Endless Space has always been the playable factions and the lore behind them. The demo I played let me try the Aspects, the sentient coral native to Saiadha, and the Kin of Sheredyn, who Endless Space players will recognize from their exploits among the stars.
The Necrophages from Endless Legend are also back, though they were only in the demo as an enemy faction. I’m dying to know how they got off of Auriga since canonically it was the Vaulters who escaped on the Argosy, or if this is a separate hive left on Saiadha by the Endless.
The Aspects play like a cross between the original game’s Mykara and Kapaku, both DLC darlings of mine. By seeding coral colonies on the map which grow and expand over time, they seek to recover from a great dieback and restore the planet’s reefs through terraforming. The Kin of Sheredyn, a military expedition from Endless Space 2’s United Empire, are stranded on Saiadha and seek to make it their new home by building fortresses and subjugating the local species.
Like the other Endless games, each faction has a unique quest line that they can follow, reaching ultimate victory if more traditional means like conquest or technological supremacy don’t pan out. Endless Legend 2 takes a much more personal approach with story events, both major and minor, by depicting them as conversations between heroes, rulers, and other NPCs rather than pages of narrative text. While I like the idea in theory, I worry that after a few hundred hours they’ll get tiresome - thank goodness for the skip button!
While I only got a chance to dip my toes into Saiadha’s turbulent, Dust-infused waters, I’m very impressed with the state of Endless Legend 2. It’s shaping up to be a streamlined, worthy successor to Auriga’s legacy, and I can’t wait to see what other factions, discoveries, and secrets of the Endless this new world has in store.
