Endless Legend review

Multiplayer: Up to 8

At first sight, Endless Legend is a traditional 4X game, albeit set in a fantasy spin-off of the science fiction universe shared by Endless Space and Dungeon of the Endless. It's easy, in this industry, to fail to innovate—after all Activision-Blizzard has made billions out of 'more of the same'. Yet, despite its franchise heritage, at every stage Endless Legend shines. Where it takes from the past, it puts its own spin on it. Where it innovates, it does so cautiously and mostly successfully.

Firstly, it comes with carefully, heavily asymmetric factions. The Ardent Mages, for example, are masochists who generate magic, both in battle and on the main map, through self-harm, whilst The Wild Walkers are an Elf-like faction, who've abandoned their forests for a career in construction. The Vaulters, by contrast, are the Viking-like survivors of a crashed spaceship who specialise in science, whilst the Broken Lords are noble armoured warriors who have to eat dust or drain life to survive.

The Vaulters are the Viking-like survivors of a crashed spaceship who specialise in science.

Let's start with settling. Like a traditional 4X game (ie, a Civ knock-off), you build cities on resource-heavy hexes, and turn food into population growth into settlers to make more cities. Except if you're the Cultists that is, who create one giant city. Or the Roving Clans, who can move their cities. Or The Broken Lords, who don't need food.

So after settling, of course, you explore the map, to meet the other factions. Except if you're uplifted dragons like the Drakken, who already know where everyone is on the map and have diplomatic relations with them from the start, and can force them into peace.

Even the diplomacy is innovative. Want to attack another faction? Well, if you don't have the influence points necessary, then you simply can't do it. But you can make it cheaper by threatening—and hence warning—the other faction. However, those same points influence points are used to pay for Empire plans - critical long-term buffs. So the more international politicking you indulge in, the less you can focus on domestic policies. Unless you're the insectoid-zombie Necrophages, that is, who don't talk but just eat, so are permanently at war with the other factions. Or the mercantile Roving Clans, who can't declare war, so have to provoke enemies into attacking them.

There are also minor factions dotted around the map. If you pacify these, they become part of your civilisation (and ultimately can be assimilated). Except if you're the Cultists, you can convert them, and they feed tribute—warriors and resources—back to the capital.

What I'm repeatedly saying is that each faction plays the game slightly differently, and has different victory conditions. The Necrophages just want to eat everything. The Vaulters just want to get back to the stars. The Broken Lords want to find a cure for their hunger.

Of course, the worst bit of most 4X games is the century-skipping, the period where you're either just clicking 'next turn', or where you're tending to a hundred cities. Endless Legend has an answer to that too, and not just the highly-effective automated governors you can put in charge of each city. Each faction has a story, rich and long, that's unlocked through quests across the map. There are a load of other ways to get quests too—stumbling through ruins or talking to the minor factions—which throw up resources, unique items and story progress. These mix up what you want to do. My peaceful game as the Drakkan was derailed when a faction story mission demanded that I not only attack one of my allies, but seize and hold one of their cities. Other times, I've been forced to make peace, or hunt down armies, or find buried treasure, all with pitch-perfect quest text.

I'm running out of room to praise the game, so quickly: the music is sweetly uplifting; the art is informative and beautiful; the unit customisation is well-handled; world-generation is spot-on; resource management and trading is superb; I can't even say anything bad about the GUI, which is a first; and it's the same great game in multiplayer.

The only disappointing bits of the game is the tutorial, which is completely insufficient, and the combat, which is like an clockwork version of Heroes of Might and Magic. When you enter battle, your troops spill out of their single stack and spread out across a small area of the map into a small arena. Then they take turns automatically attacking and moving, with terrain height and troop type playing a big part in victory. Thankfully, like Total War, you can just skip the battles completely. Given the small number of units in a battle and the semi-automation, I didn't find these tactically interesting, so automating was a good choice.

Thankfully, smart as ever, Amplitude Studios has created another astounding story-driven game, that really has taken the best bits of RTS, RPG and 4X, drawing much from Endless Space, and spun it differently for every faction. Save for the weakness of the combat, this is a game that wannabe developers should play and learn from. Given that it has eight major factions who are all nearly infinitely customisable, the replay value is, well, endless.