What is it? Rule-breaking sci-fantasy 4X
Release date: September 17, 2026 (1.0 version)
Expect to pay: $50/£45
Developer: Amplitude Studios
Publisher: Hooded Horse
Reviewed on: Radeon RX 6800 XT, Ryzen 9 5900, 32GB RAM
Steam Deck: Verified
Link: Official site
There has been no drought of good 4X games over the past decade. Part of that has been the steady work of Amplitude, whose Endless series has become a stalwart part of the strategy scene. Endless Legend 2 further cements Amplitude's legacy as a great 4X developer, delivering the studio's trademark creativity and standout visual design in a modernized package.
The original Endless Legend was a shot in the arm for a 4X genre that had gotten pretty stale. If you'd asked me in the years afterward if I wanted more Endless Legend, I'd have said yes. In the years since, many of its innovations—and those from sibling series Endless Space—have become standards in the genre. You might expect that to have dulled some of the charm. 12 years later, though, I still want more Endless Legend.
Sciences fantastical
I wanted more Endless Legend because there's never enough good science fantasy. Not the Star Wars kind, though that's fun too, but the kind where it's sword and sorcery with a technological flavor. Where it's mostly monsters and wizards. Bows, not blasters.
So I'm glad that we're back to Endless Legend's worlds of crashed starship survivors building robotic golems and battling with titanium swords and wielding magic that might just be nanotechnology. The setting and its weird people are just as good as the first time, though a bit more scientific-feeling. No dragons, for example, or elf stand-ins—instead we've got evolved desert lizards, coral robots, and sand spirit genies. It's another rich world that lets its developers break the rules of the genre in interesting and creative ways.
The shoreline recedes, unveiling sunken landscapes and ancient technologies that are now ripe for your faction to colonize and exploit.
The new world of Saiadha is familiar in one important way: Like Auriga of Endless Legend, Saiadha is dying. This time though it's because the Endless, an ancient race, sealed something away beneath Saiadha when they terraformed it from a planet of desert dunes into one of storm-wracked seas and isolated islands. Now that something is coming back, which means the oceans are draining away into the planet's core.
Every few dozen turns a monsoon comes, shrouding the world in storms, and at the end of that monsoon season comes Tidefall: The shoreline recedes, unveiling sunken landscapes and ancient technologies that are now ripe for your faction to colonize and exploit—a perfect setup for a genre about expanding and building.
Aesthetics fantastical
Endless Legend 2 continues the tradition of the first game in another way with one of the most pleasing, coherent aesthetics in the entire strategy game space. The painterly color choices across terrain and units, both matte and gloss, make different areas of the world and the new biomes that emerge from the ocean very distinct.
Endless Legend 2 also makes very good use of texture on terrain to convey types of earth, sand, grass, stone, or even a field of vast living circuitry. My major critique is that the lighting is quite flat—it really only changes during monsoons—and something more dynamic or directional might have helped highlight the models and environments. Better to have simple lighting than effects that muddy the visual environment, though.
While it's still a best-in-genre user interface, interacting with Endless Legend 2 doesn't feel as aesthetically pleasing and crisp as the first game. The redesigned resource displays, menus bar, and action wheels are good, but the use of symbols on the map for cities and armies rather than clear, obvious text labels conveys less information while making the player do more work to understand what they're looking at. I had issues distinguishing the symbols for cities, armies, and resource locations until I learned where each was located. A temporary annoyance, but bad friction nonetheless.
The highlight for many will be yet another standout soundtrack from Arnaud Roy. Ethereal at times—subdued and ambient—it makes extensive use of a crystal organ. What most impressed me was how it changes as you go, avoiding repetitive loops and adapting dynamically to the screen you're on or what's happening in a battle round. Opening a diplomacy screen, for example, seems to dull out or soften the bass parts so you can hear the faction leader characters speak clearly.
Play fantastical
What may disappoint some about Endless Legend 2 is that many of the first game's signature innovations have become routine. Ideas like changing or terraforming the map, or your cities expanding over large regions, have been adopted by many others in the genre. The signature Amplitude resource system is present in full and simple to understand: Incomes for cities—FIDSI for Food, Industry, Dust, Science, and Influence—with tradeable luxury resource stockpiles for upgrades and everything else. Some might be bored of it, but it works really well, and I don't think you should mess with a good system.
What is still superb is how Amplitude wants every faction to break the rules in some way, repeating only a few tricks from Endless Legend or Endless Space. Particularly fresh is how Saiadha's receding oceans play into the genre tropes of a 4X.
It throws you back into the most exciting and interesting parts of the 4X genre multiple times throughout a typical length game.
The genre is at its best during two phases—the initial exploration and expansion, and the secondary squabble and race over who will control resources and which factions will actually fight with each other for them. Endless Legend's system of neutral territories is perfect for this, as you can stake claims by building camps, but must be wary of attack from enemies or marauding minor factions who can burn those down without declaring an official war.
The worst part of most 4X is when the map stagnates, empires get huge, and you engage in a grind toward whatever finish line you're aiming for. In Endless Legend 2, every time the seas recede and new land appears, the shorelines change—previously isolated territories may connect to each other, precious deposits or strategic resources may appear, and new dungeons for your heroes to delve or undiscovered minor factions may show up. Tidefall means your previously safe border may become vulnerable, or that your worst city is now part of a rich new frontier. In short, it throws you back into the most exciting and interesting parts of the 4X genre multiple times throughout a typical length game.
Tactics fantastical
The changing map also means your armies are in constant motion. You always want them moving from place to place, scouting out new territory, gathering curiosities, and either fighting or doing quests for neutral minor factions. At the same time you need them to guard your borders against potential aggressors, or against the terrible Doomwraiths that come each monsoon season, and you want them in position for the next tidefall. Where your military units and scouts are just map decoration in some 4X games, in Endless Legend 2 they're hooked into every part of the game loop in a way that feels like part of the exploration and wonder of a good fantasy story.
4X games are rarely well-tuned, but I found that the settings in Endless Legend 2 actually worked very well on their defaults.
For all that, the tactical combat is perhaps less rich than I'd like it to be. The positioning elements of the turn-based fights are as good as ever, especially because of how it happens across the natural game map. You carefully position your armies to attack enemies from favorable terrain. As a faction like the Tahuks, who rely on ranged combat and want to exploit chokepoints, or the Sandshapers, who want to fight on desert terrain whenever possible, controlling space by positioning is still very good.
What leads to it feeling less rich is that it's very tightly wound—damage numbers are such that fights are nearly equal exchanges unless you outnumber the enemy 2:1, and scraping out an advantage often feels like exploiting the system by stacking buffs or abusing the terrain.
That said, 4X games are rarely well-tuned, but I found that the difficulty settings in Endless Legend 2 actually worked very well on their defaults. Higher settings actually delivered greater difficulty in consistent, measured steps, and the highest difficulties were so rough that you could end up in wholly unwinnable starts at times, which paradoxically I'd count as a real success.
That success, however, is still achieved by inflating the AI factions' abilities with bonus resources rather than making them better at playing the game. So sometimes the only way to win those tight tactical combats against a stream of armies you could never out-produce was by abusing the heck out of a system.
Weirdos fantastical
The factions are the highlight of this game, as with any Endless game, because of how asymmetrical they are. Each of them breaks or ignores some fundamental game mechanic.
Whether it's the Children of Sheredyn who'd rather build a fortress than a public plaza, or the Sandshapers, living mineral constructs who can't farm and must scrape together rare resources and terraform the world back into desert in order to gather the minerals they need to produce new population. There are even two "rogue" variants of factions that invert their primary playstyle—the defensive Sheredyn become an aggressive expansionist legion, the devouring Necrophage become an enslaving swarm of cyborgs.
There's less extremity than in Endless Legend in places—no faction can move its cities, for example—but there's still wild stuff in here that would be seen as unacceptable in other games. The friendly Aspects, a symbiosis of living corals and robotics, can spend their copious influence to force treaties like peace or trade on other factions. The Necrophage can only have one city, their hive, and are always justified in declaring war on others. (They're hungry, OK?)
There's just not another 4X where you can play as religious fanatic lizards who use a solar mirror laser to turn the world to glass. I appreciate that.
source https://www.pcgamer.com/games/strategy/endless-legend-2-review/
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