Welp, I got distracted from my queue again. But I did manage to play my distraction game to completion, so here's a review thereof!
Endless Space 2 is the latest from Amplitude Studios, creators of a number of thematically similar games with the word "Endless" in their titles. As you might guess from the title, Endless Space 2 is a follow-up to the original Endless Space, a galactic colonization 4X game from several years ago. Less obviously, it's something of a fusion of Endless Space and the fantasy-flavored Endless Legend. ES2 uses the outer-space backdrop and mechanics of Endless Space but adds in the shinier UI and story-focused embellishments like quests and heroes from Legend, making it the culmination of all Amplitude's design work to date.
One end of a twin elliptical galaxy, on the eve of victory by the blue player. The pushpin box in the upper right represents a storyline quest, and you can see a compact summary of 4X resources and research at the upper left.
The first thing that will probably strike you as you start a game of ES2 is that there are a lot of moving parts here. I mean, a lot. You have five basic resources: food, industry, Dust (money), science, and influence (abbreviated FIDSI). There are a variety of "strategic" and "luxury" resources you can also stockpile and use to various purposes. You have the quests to pursue, space and ground battles to take part in, expansion both into new star systems and across planets within star systems, buildings to erect, diplomacy with other factions, and political parties inside your empire that can pass laws. And on and on! The tutorial is somewhat adequate in explaining the various pieces, but you won't have a thorough handle on it until well into the game.
Mitigating the complexity is the fact that it's almost all numbers. There are only a handful of technologies, quests, or buildings that actually grant you some new and orthogonal capability, like destroying planets or buying and selling in a galactic marketplace. Instead, move after move is some flavor or another of number-go-up: more FIDSI, more "approval" that keeps your populace producing optimal FIDSI, guns that inflict more damage or shields that make your ships take less. There are innumerable variables that affect these things, whether it's a population species that likes living on cold planets, or a weapon or tactic that performs better against certain opponents--but most of the time, optimizing such fiddly pieces is unnecessary. If you're pushing your numbers across the board, the ripples of variance vanish into the overall swell.
What, one of my colonies is merely "content" instead of "ecstatic"?! Ingrates. Time to cut my losses and sell the system off to one of my allies.
As a result, playing ES2 can feel detached and sterile. There's not much immersion, no sense that you're doing anything but massaging the algorithms of a simulation. The moments that manage to buck this trend thus really stand out. Each faction has lovely opening and concluding cinematics, and there's a similarly beautiful mixed-media animation that plays when you send a colonization ship to settle a new world. This may be heretical among 4X fans who I'd imagine just want to get to the next order of magnitude ASAP, but I'd have loved to see more of that. Why don't I get a glorious animatic when building a wonder of the Universe, a feat only one empire per playthrough is allowed to attain? Why is terraforming an entire planet, turning it from an ash-covered ball of waste into a lush savannah, just a blip in a construction queue and a palette swap? Even Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, created at the end of the last millennium, celebrated your first construction of a new building type with a Gandhi quote and a brief FMV.
I've certainly enjoyed playing ES2, and might spend some more time with it, including tinkering with its bustling mod library. But for now I'd say I prefer the more personal scale and vibrant colors of Endless Legend, of this studio's offerings.
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