Endless Legend 2 Early Access review: A promising restart for Amplitude

While the thick curtain of rain pouring down during one of Saiadha’s monumental monsoons is no problem in itself – indeed, the higher spawn rate of anomalies and increased post-battle loot drops make it quite lucrative – some of its accompanying effects are less beneficial. I’m talking about the radioactive glowing gorges that suddenly popped up all over my territory, spawning deadly enemies called Doomwraiths that corrupt the land around them. Nasty business, those Doomwraiths. My first attempt at taking one down quickly had me save-scum for another try to save my precious army, which saw me achieve a Pyrrhic Victory over the beast, successfully defending my territory. What’s more, the Doomwraith’s carcass transformed into a permanent landmark on the map, providing lots of valuable resources to be exploited.

Endless Legend 2, Amplitude Studios’ first turn-based 4X strategy game since regaining its independence from SEGA, puts a major emphasis on the world it’s set in — both in terms of narrative and mechanics.

Saiadha starts out relatively small and constricted, its continents surrounded by a vast ocean. You’re free to explore with your first units and find the optimal settlement spot before laying the foundation for your capital. As usual for Amplitude, the world is already divided into provinces. Building a town or outpost in a province grants you ownership over the entire area, but you still need to build districts starting at the city center, aside from special cases like strategic resource mines. Players familiar with Amplitude’s games will feel at home immediately, recognizing the icons for Food, Industry, Dust, Science, and Influence — or FIDSI, for short.

It’s a tried system that’s been the backbone of the studio’s strategy games for years. I’ve had my issues with it in the past: Humankind’s Industry-focused cultures were so strong that they made every other resource irrelevant for a very long time, for example. Endless Legend 2 – at least in my experience so far – avoids this pitfall thanks to the asymmetry of its factions, but we’ll get to that later.

Back to Saiadha: As you explore, you’ll encounter collectible anomalies, minor faction dwellings, dungeons, resources, and special landmarks that trigger side quests — in short: There’s a lot to find. But what’s unique about Endless Legend 2 is that this exploration phase does not end once the early game has played out. Remember those monsoons I mentioned earlier? These appear periodically and are followed up by a Tidefall: The world’s ocean retreats, lowering the waterline a little to uncover additional lands. The exploration phase gets renewed throughout the game — as does that wonderful feeling of being in a race for the choicest portions of territory.

Couple that mechanic with stuff like Doomwraiths depositing new resource nodes through their demise or important, quest-giving landmarks existing, and you get a world that feels very alive, dynamic, and important beyond its sheer purpose of being your game board. It also keeps the game fresh at all times and leads to interesting decision making. For example, you can bait a Doomwraith from neighboring territories into your own, trading a little corruption for a potential long-term resource gain.

Making the world feel alive and important in its own right is something Age of Wonders 4 has done as part of a recent expansion as well, so Endless Legend 2 featuring it as a core design aspect is a very good sign — and I think it’s something that should be built and expanded on during Early Access.

Saiadha is a crucial part of the game’s narrative content, both in terms of side quests and all factions’ main stories, but I won’t spoil anything — which feels a bit weird to write in a strategy game review. Aside from the stories the game itself delivers, there is plenty of material in the game to create emergent narratives from. Your heroes can be assigned friends and partners, can build bases on the map, and can gain archrivals. Sacking the headquarters of a nemesis who wounded your best friend can become a legitimate player goal, which is awesome.

All that story content isn’t just flavor either. There are different endings you can reach and all dialog choices – you usually get two or three – have consequences that can be quite severe.

Endless Legend 2 generally has a good, functional UI that’s visually appealing. It uses nested tooltips to provide you additional information on key words and is great at showing players the potential effects of their actions. When you select an improvement or district to build, you get a breakdown of all the ways it generates yields and the actual resource output you can expect from it at that moment. 

You still want to plan ahead carefully, of course: Synergies between many building types and tiles exist, making city-planning extremely fun and rewarding. But the information shown on screen allows even a casual player to always make good decisions in the moment, which is great to make the game more approachable.

At the same time, the game does not feature an encyclopedia that you could search for any information you might need in your current position, forcing you to browse a myriad of menus until you locate the one tooltip you wanted to find. Likewise, some crucial information is not shown at all. The Last Lords have a unique mechanic that allows you to sacrifice any foreign population to create more Last Lords population. Although a tooltip provides the definition of foreign pops, nowhere is there a counter showing you the actual amount of these pops you currently have in your city. That’s an area I’m inclined to be lenient on for an Early Access title, though, since it’s a relatively easy fix.

Endless Legend 2 also has a problem with window clutter. Even when you’re in the middle of a dialog, you’ll get pop-ups about a new technology being finished, diplomatic deals being offered, and someone getting close to fulfilling a victory condition. Yes, this is all important information — but don’t drown me in it. Let me take care of the narrative without hiding dialog choices behind another pop-up or obstructing the text, please. Again, this should be an easy fix.

Another area I feel less positive about is combat. It’s just very… simple. That’s by design, to be sure, but with only hero characters having abilities (and these being restricted to once per fight) and the battle maps being more miss than hit a lot of the time due to unfair positioning or small size, I found myself preferring auto-resolve very quickly. No complaints about the unit diversity and information provided for combat, though — that all looks very solid. The game also has an upgrade system that leaves no unit behind, so you don’t have to deal with obsolete armies.

There are still moments when combat feels great. Making a clutch kill to restore the HP of your Last Lords units on the frontline, landing a major blow with a hero ability, and so on feels pretty satisfying. Positioning is important with high ground and forests playing a role. But it feels very samey quickly.

Luckily, the same can’t be said for playthroughs in general thanks to the game’s asymmetric factions. The pacifist Aspects play completely different from the all-consuming Necrophage swarm or the Dust-huffing, undying Last Lords. It’s not just their unique unit rosters or faction traits — there are fundamental mechanical differences. 

The Last Lords don’t need Food. They can’t even produce it. They subsist on Dust. Likewise, their armies don’t regenerate health naturally, but can be healed immediately with Dust. That little fact changes everything from which provinces you want to expand into to how you wage war. Needing foreign pops to accelerate your own pop growth informs your diplomacy in totally different ways than the Necropages’ Meat requirement informs their stance.

Despite the asymmetry, every faction has viable ways to win thanks to the game’s various win conditions, which include holding lots of territory, making everyone your friend, or amassing all sorts of resources. You can even win by clearing a certain number of dungeons, though I found this particular requirement to be set a little high. There is balancing work to be done for sure.

All in all, though, this Early Access version of Endless Legend 2 is very promising. The devs know what they want to do with this game and have clearly focused on showcasing the vision, building a strong foundation they can expand upon while leaving enough room for community suggestions.