Endless Legend 2 hands-on preview: A robust successor

You know what’s really neat? Corals. They’re incredible lifeforms and a bit underappreciated in the realm of fantasy. You know what Endless Legend 2 has to offer? That’s right, corals. Or, to be a little more precise about it, sentient coral robots. It also has bugs – both the insectoid and technical variety – and humans, but the Aspects are what stand out while playing a preview build of the game.

Their looks aren’t the only unique features of the Aspects. They’re a pacifistic race, who benefit more from entering beneficial relationships with other factions on the map than to conquer them, and they slowly spread fields of corals all over the world, assimilating the map into their greater consciousness – which, yes, carries some dark undertones. It’s a little bit like the Zerg spreading Creep in StarCraft and it feels pretty satisfying as a player to see such a visible reminder of your influence on the map.

Endless Legend has always been a standout in the genre thanks to its faction asymmetry and in this regard its sequel follows its footsteps. Amplitude is clearly putting a lot of emphasis on each faction’s mechanics and narrative. I say narrative, because that’s a major part of the game. Each race has what’s essentially a main storyline it can follow throughout a match with dialog choices, quests, and rewards, on top of side stories providing extra flavor and opportunities.

This has been a trend in turn-based strategy games, but Endless Legend 2 is really turning it up a notch — it feels like playing a RPG sometimes and those storylines further add to the identities of each faction.

Of course, the core gameplay is shared between everyone: You settle cities, expand your realm, assimilate minor factions, explore dungeons, and try to overpower the other major players using Amplitude’s FIDSI system – that is food, industry, dust, science, and influence. Influence almost feels like the main thing you’re often starved of, being not only required to expand your presence into other zones of the map, found cities, and assimilate smaller tribes, but also being needed to add new hexes to your settlements and to engage in diplomacy. It’s no coincidence that the devs changed the name to FIDSI from FIMS – food, industry, money, science – to emphasize the vital importance of influence.

It does incentivize you to think long and hard on the impact of your decisions and your priorities, which is good, but it sometimes feels a little too stifling.

Endless Legend 2’s other unique hook is the climate system. Devastating storms can envelop the map and retreating tides slowly reveal additional areas to explore and settle. With the build being locked to 125 turns, I feel like I haven’t seen most of what the Tidefall mechanic can do, but my early impression of it is thoroughly positive. It adds a bit of dynamism to the map itself, a feature you don’t really see much of in turn-based strategy games.

Like in its predecessor, heroes play a large role in your empire, be it as generals or politicians. You can slot Notables into your state councils to receive passive bonuses from them, acquiring more personnel through quests or faction assimilation. 

Heroes have several attributes, which in turn influence the effectiveness of their active and passive abilities, of which you can unlock more as they level up. There is a gear system to further power them up and Amplitude went above and beyond to provide the characters with more personality as well: They can have lovers and archenemies and even get a personal headquarters that appears as a district on the map. All of that has a lot of potential to create different stories from match to match, enhancing that role-playing aspect.

This is where Endless Legend 2 shines brightly so far. Where it falters for me comparatively is the combat, which – simply put – is a little boring. Precious few changes have been made compared to Amplitude’s previous games: You smash your units into enemy units, terrain influencing the numbers a bit, but there’s been shockingly little flavor and variety to it all so far.

Compared to genre peers like Age of Wonders 4 or Civilization 7, combat feels barren and a bit like an afterthought — I found myself using quick resolve to skip battles very early on, which is not a great sign. I find that really surprising, because the game’s asymmetrical design and the personalities of all the different factions should make for fantastic, varied combat mechanics. It’s like the battle system took a toilet break when the developers bestowed flavor and uniqueness on the game’s parts. It’s not even necessarily a depth problem. There are plenty of passives and skills that provide tactical challenges and opportunities and there’s an intriguing upgrade system that allows you to specialize your basic units. It might be the presentational layer more so than the mechanical one, but honestly, I can’t quite put my finger on why exactly the battles didn’t click with me yet.

Another concern is its technical state. I frequently had issues with turns simply not ending and locking the game, making me force a shutdown, restarting, and then redoing the turn. The UI certainly had more thought put into it than Civilization 7’s and is largely in a good place, though the sheer amount of options presented on screen may be a little intimidating to players at the beginning — not to mention the flood of notifications you’re getting. Some options are placed strangely, such as characters’ active abilities during combat, which can be found in the top left side of the screen next to their avatar instead of a more conventional bar at the bottom. 

You can actively use nested tooltips, locking windows to remain open by pressing Shift, which is neat, and it’s easy to compare items with each other to determine what’s best for your heroes to wear. There is a lot of good quality-of-life stuff in the UI. Though a minimap is absent, you can zoom out to get an overview of the world, with icons even denoting strategic resources — which is necessary, because there is no other indication on the map itself telling you that these tiles are of special importance.

Visually, the game’s map is its prettiest asset, its lush fantasy environments and the factions’ unique architecture blending into a pleasing image. Animations aren’t always the best and it feels like combat once again is bearing the brunt of this, adding to the system’s woes.

As mentioned above, being restricted to 125 turns – and thus far off the endgame – didn’t give me the most complete overview of the game and its systems. It may be that combat is getting much better with late game units or fully powered-up heroes, for example. My first impression remains a cautiously positive one, though. Amplitude’s world, faction design, and narrative ideas are quite convincing, the empire management depends largely on your opinion on the FIDSI system, but has been very engaging so far for me, and combat needs to improve. But that’s nothing that couldn’t be finetuned in Early Access. All in all, Endless Legend 2 is shaping up to be a robust improvement on its predecessor.

Endless Legend 2 is targeting a 2025 Early Access release on PC.