there is a lot to like about Endless Space 2, as well as some really good ideas around trade and military that I’ll go into in a second. Heroes and leaders have 2D animated portraits, there’s an absolute ton of unique art for improvements, techs and events, Endless Space 2 has taken note of Stellaris’s early game exploration and provides its own stripped-down version where you send scout ships around to explore anomalies and curiosities etc. This is surprising given the sincere effort both games have made to improve on the comparatively sterile experience of Endless Space by injecting oodles of character into every element of the game ES 2’s races are fully voiced, have unique techs in the tech tree, narrative questlines that provide some backstory to who they are, and - very importantly - each have at least one gimmick that ensures they play very, very differently, from the nomadic Vodyani who have giant arkships instead of colonies and who must generate new population units by leeching life essence from foreign inhabited systems, to the mechanical Riftborn who build new population in their colony production queue and who can conjure up time-manipulating singularities around systems that provide either a bonus or a malus to any colonies located there. Mostly though - and even after 27 hours playing it, I still think it is a valid criticism - it is because, just like Endless Legend, Endless Space 2 kind of sucks at building the emergent story of your empire’s growth from a single planet to a galaxy-bestriding colossus. Partially this is because I made the mistake of buying it a week before it came out of Early Access, foolishly assuming (because I’d done the same thing with Battle Brothers and had a whale of a time) that it wouldn’t be too different from the finished article instead Amplitude released a 3 gigabyte patch on launch day that papered over a lot of the obvious Early Access holes and made it significantly more coherent as an end-to-end experience. I regarded the first game as something of a qualified success, but the fantasy followup Endless Legend left me completely cold despite having some ideas and mechanics that were, objectively, very good indeed – it’s the first time ever that I’ve bounced off a game without being able to really explain why, and to start with I was afraid that the same might be true of Endless Space’s sequel. It took me a while to warm up to Endless Space 2.
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