Foreign diplomacy is fine, but with domestic politics being so intricate, it can feel a bit stale. The grandeur of the space battles almost feels like it was crafted solely to produce cool visuals for trailers, but Amplitude does try its very best to bring character to a genre often suffering from a lack of it. It's usually the one with the bigger stick wins anyways, so there's little to get excited about. The spectacle gets repetitive after a while though, and after a time you'll probably be happier skipping the cinematics and going straight to the results. For the first few times, watching these leviathans duke it out is entertaining and brings back memories of sci-fi staples like Babylon 5 or the new Battlestar Galactica. Once your fleet of destroyers and battleships encounters an enemy, all you can do is choose from a few tactics and press play. While its importance is undeniable, the player's control over it is skin-deep at best.
You might think from the gameplay trailers and screenshots that the combat is a major part of the game. Don't expect to learn everything on the first go, although the rather beautiful and well-crafted interface helps you learn the ropes.Īll's not well in the race for the galaxy, though.
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Endless Space 2 has a myriad of systems to see, experience and tinker with, and the adequate tutorial only scratches the surface of how to properly manipulate them all. There are also heroes, who can lead forces, guide colonies, and function as party leaders while gaining levels and power. Aside from maybe Stellaris, this is rather unheard of in a galaxy-conquering game and truly exhilarating to see and play with. They also bring their own small bonuses and preferences to your table, so what you end up with is a proper intergalactic soup of many, many races and ideas all mixed together in (dis)harmony. Members of major and minor factions join your empire both in this way and via immigration. For the first time in a strategy game, democracy as a government type had very real consequences and totalitarianism started to feel like a nice, pragmatic option for the Sophons. This meant losing support from our science-boosting Laws while new, more aggressive laws were enacted. To our dismay, the newly "liberated" cravers voted the Militaristic party to overwhelming victory. What we hadn't considered, however, was that these new members of the empire can vote. In one game our scientific Sophons conquered several planets from nearby Cravers. Every once in a while come the elections, where the balance of power may shift, and not always in your favour. What you do, build, and choose affects which "party" gains favour. Some agree with your current politics of Science, for example, but others may feel more militaristic or religious. Your own faction isn't a homogenic clump of equally-minded drones (well, aside from Cravers) but a splintered group of people. Not only do you have the usual suspects of space exploration via small scout ships (that can also send probes into unknown space past the star lanes), colonising planets, and building improvements to support the growing populace, but you also get some well-thought game mechanics about domestic policy and colony management. Amplitude has also crafted unique single-player campaign-like quest chains for each with branching narratives and this, combined with the factions' differences, means you can get several wildly varied playthroughs depending on how you choose to start your trek through the stars.Įndless Space 2 is also a game of many systems. One race doesn't bother colonising planets at all and instead prefers the comforts of their massive ark ships. The mecha-insectoid race of Cravers, however, strips planets clean of resources and have to be on the move at all times, or suffer extinction (consequentially they make awful neighbours). The Unfallen, for instance, link planets together with cosmic roots and suffer heavily if the link is separated. Not only do they have flat bonuses to science or industrial production, but they also exhibit much more exotic qualities as well. The game's many races, or factions in this case, are incredibly varied. Endless Space 2 is more about domestic politics, and this is much more interesting than you might think. Smaller and larger ships float around like pirate ships on the sea, exchanging shots of plasma and cannons, and the player's role in these cinematic bouts is limited. If you're into deep tactical spaceship combat where a single big battle might take half an hour to complete, this might not be the game for you. From the first fumbling playthrough, though, it's clear that the emphasis lies in a new, seldom visited direction. Endless Space 2 might, at first, look like your typical turn-based space strategy title, as it has multiple races to choose from, planets to explore, fleets to clash against, and enemies or alliances to be made.