Endless Legend 2 Necrophage preview: A swarm power fantasy done right

Sometimes you want to play a strategy game, but you don’t want to have to think much about what you’re doing. You just want to conquer. You just want to dominate. You just want to eat — and that’s where Endless Legend 2’s Necrophage come into play.

They are your typical swarm faction, like the Zerg in StarCraft or the Tyranids in Warhammer 40,000. They are not evil, they are simply hungry and the world is an all-you-can-eat buffet. Amplitude doesn’t even bother you with founding colonies. The Necrophage need only a sole capital city as the center of their empire, though they can claim other territories by building a Burrow and upgrading it into a Nest. But these are not fully functional cities. They are merely outposts — gateways for your unending hordes.

Endless Legend 2’s extensive narrative system sometimes sends you on a worldspanning chase for NPC armies or specific locations, which can be rather annoying if your main army currently is completely out of position. But the Necrophage don’t care about positioning — Burrows and Nests anchor a worldwide underground tunnel network, enabling Necrophage armies to cross half the globe in a single turn. If you focus your efforts into building up this network as you explore, you’ll be able to react to any threats or quests in no time at all. It’s perfect to apply pressure on enemies as well, since your reinforcements are never far away.

Speed. Relentlessness. These are already two great qualities of swam factions we can put a checkmark behind. And there’s more to add, because the way the swarm gains units is really thematic. If you defeat enemy armies in battle, you automatically spawn Larva nearby. These are the most basic Necrophage units and can be evolved into stronger units by feeding them corpses. The more you fight, the more your army grows. Need to sacrifice some Larvae in a battle to keep the momentum going? No worries, they’ll be replaced immediately.

This mechanic really captures another core aspect of a good swarm faction: It feels like you’re an unstoppable force that grows at the expense of the enemy, both in quantity and in quality.

When you conquer a city with the Necrophage, you don’t get the option of turning it into your colony. Instead, you can either eat some of the inhabitants for the time being (the unspoken intent being that you’ll be back for dessert later) or consume all, including the city’s strategic resources. With your armies also being able to harvest the terrain they traverse, you truly feel like a threat on a world-ending scale, leaving nothing else behind you than barren soil.

Who cares about the finer points of Endless Legend 2’s improved diplomacy system if you can just start snacking away? After all, you wouldn’t waste time by talking to your meal, and for the Necrophage everything is edible. It helps that combat feels a lot better than in my last hands-on with the game, since fighting is what you’ll be doing as the swarm most of the time — but I still dislike the combat UI with unit cards and abilities being in the top left. It’s so easy to miss stuff.

That said, the Necrophage don’t mesh very well with some aspects of the game’s hero system, like being able to assign friends and companions to characters. Are they really capable of such sentiments and relationships? Renaming these relationships for flavor reasons would be a very simple fix.

Regardless, Amplitude has hit the mark with this faction — the Necrophage are an expertly crafted swarm power fantasy. Getting hungry? The latest Endless Legend 2 demo will go live on Steam on August 11, 2025, allowing you to try them out yourself.

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