Endless Legend
Create your own Legend Another sunrise, another day of toil. Food must be grown, industries built, science and magic advanced, and wealth collected. Urgency drives these simple efforts, however, for your planet holds a history of unexplained apocalypse, and the winter you just survived was the worst on record. A fact that has also been true for the previous five. As you discover the lost secrets of your world and the mysteries of the legends and ruins that exist as much in reality as in rumor, you will come to see that you are not alone. Other peoples also struggle to survive, to grow, and perhaps even to conquer. You have a city, a loyal populace, and a few troops; your power and magic should be sufficient to keep them alive. But beyond that, nothing is certain… Where will you go, what will you find, and how will you react? Will your trail be one of roses, or of blood?
Steam User 22
With the release of Age of Wonders IV and Planetfall going on sale, I am reminded of my favourite 4X Strategy game featuring tactical battles, gorgeous art, deep lore and stellar mechanical execution in the genre.
I heartily recommend Endless Legend. I have 200+ hours and will almost certainly one day return to Auriga to craft magical weapons out of rare minerals, cast spells and battle titans against mythical creatures. This game is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of the 4X genre and made me an Amplitude Studios fan for life.
If the presentation alone does not grab you, you will also find a fully fleshed out, deep, interesting 4X strategy game with Civ-style empire building (something I found AoW: Planetfall lacking) to compliment rich tactical combat. Amplitude's ambitious best-of-both-worlds approach works phenomenally and pays off here.
Not only can you enrich yourself in the standard fare of beautiful cities, empires, diplomacy, and combat, but pursue excellently written (if only written, not fully voice acted) story quests and learn about characters, stories, intriguing, goals and ambitions of each unique faction.
I am a huge fan of the Endless series, and this is my favourite among them.
Pros:
-Phenomenal art style and presentation
-Clear, crisp, attractive UI
-Fully fleshed out overworld / Civ-style empire building mechanics
-Fully fleshed out Tactical combat
-Heroes and hero progression is intuitive and excellent
-Unit upgrades
-Story quests in each random map / campaign
-Huge variety in maps, NPCs and factions / faction mechanics
Cons:
-Hero and unit upgrade/ progression will start to feel same in late game
-Some progression systems are samey after 100-200+ hrs
-Could have had better faction customization (it's just swapping stat effects)
Bonus: the DLC is also quite excellent. While the amphibious faction one is lackluster, the volcanic faction DLC is stellar and they are very fun to play.
Thanks for reading.
Steam User 22
I was introduced to turn based games by an ex boyfriend, at least my love affair with Auriga has weathered the time since then ;) Need a mindless gratifying grind? This is your game. Need play by play battles to engage your attention? Yep, there's that too. It's all in how you play, what faction you're doing (I love me a walking mushroom so I play Mykara a lot) and what parameters you set up. It's fun and entertaining, and if you're reading reviews you're probably leaning towards getting it. Do eeeetttt!
Steam User 16
After nearly 10 years still one of the greatest 4x titles. This game feels unique - each faction is different. This is one of the few games that I’ve justified buying the dlc.
If you like strategy games but also want to experience a story, uncover the world's well written lore, I would highly recommend this game. Plus, the soundtrack is great, worldbuilding is fantastic, and the artwork in this game is beautiful.
Steam User 17
After 8 years and 100+ hours, I can say this is a great game. One of the better 4X games I have played in the last decade. I recently started playing again, and while the last DLC is quite hit or miss, overall the game performs well on all levels. With my most recent re-install, I also downloaded the Endless Legend Community Patch (ELCP) and it helps quite a bit with some minor issues I had with the vanilla game. If you like 4X, like fantasy/sci-fi, I would suggest you pick up a copy of Endless Legend. I wish I had more time to play it.
Steam User 12
A very solid civ-like 4X strategy. If you want similar mechanics but prefer a fantasy setting over a historical one - this game is a great choice. ;-)
Steam User 10
My biggest gripe with the civilization games is how samey a lot of the leaders and civilizations feel in comparison to one another. Endless legend does not have this problem. Good pick up for anyone that likes grand strategy, 4x gameplay.
Steam User 10
I wish Steam had a neutral review option, but I'm not gonna give it a negative because it definitely deserves it less than a positive. This game is an interesting mix of absolutely fantastic things and downright terrible. I'll start with the positive ones. I will make a couple comparisons to Civilization. This is going to be a bit longer. There's a summary at the end.
The Good things:
Audio: easily one of, if not the, best thing about this game. The tracks are awesome, fit the theme, and you don't get tires of them even after hearing them many times. Some may sound a bit familiar from Endless Space, but with enough of a variation it doesn't matter.
Graphics: The world you play in is beautifully done. The game does not try to look real, and because everything is done so well and fits together it's amazing. I don't think the game could have looked better if it were trying to look as real as possible. One minor downside are the unit models, which sometimes have textures with low resolutions or their body just wiggles weirdly, but it's nothing you will see often.
Depth: This game has a LOT of mechanics you might be unaware of at first, but which can give you important bonuses. There's an automated city manager for those who do not want to micromanage cities a lot, but you can manage your citizens one by one if you'd like to. The amount of info about your empire you can acces from the game's menus is extreme, and is meant for hardcore micromanagers only.
Customisability: When starting a new game, there's almost nothing you can't tweak. Amount of water, landmass type, amount of islands, shape of landmass, average land elevation... this could go on for quite some time. You can even create your own faction from the perks of the pre-made factions.
The Neutral things:
Exploration: Everything you would expect from a 4X game. No big twist here.
Region system: This is not something you would find in a "standart" 4X game (think Civ). The map is divided into regions that can cover anything between 30 to 60 tiles. They also have random shapes, so one could be long and just a couple tiles thick, and the one next to it could be a near perfect circle. You can only found one city per region, and when you do you gain control over the entire area it covers. This brings me to the thing that drags this into the neutral category: You can't really customize the tiles themselves. All you can do is build an exploitation site on a strategic/luxury resource and that's basically it, so most of the land you own is meaningless. You also can't build roads yourself, they kind of get auto-created over time. There is also always one minor faction per district. See below for more info on these.
Minor factions: Kind of like city states in Civ, but worse. They have one to three villages on your district, and can attack you if they decide so, although they usually don't. You need to pacify them so they can be of use to you. You can go about it two ways: destroy their villages with force or complete a quest they give you. Once you have them pacified, you can use their special unit design yourself. Unfortunately I never saw a reason to use them over the basic faction units you get.
The Bad things:
Combat: Honestly, I don't think it could have been any worse. Think a blend of Heroes of Might and Magic with Civ. Basically, you make armies out of your units (up to 8 after some research). When you enter combat, you have a playing field you can't leave. Now ypu tell all your units what to do (just move or attack) and then hit launch. This will have each units do the actoon it was supposed to do in the order of their initiative. Problem is, the enemy is mixed into this order as well. This wouldn't be that bad by itself, but with how clunky it all is, I just let everything attack the things the game preset with minor adjustments here and there. This gets old VERY fast because there aren't any tactics involved. Luckily there's an auto-resolve option.
Unit designing: This sounds good on paper, but reality is unfortunately different. You get these "templates" of units on which you can then equip weapons and armor. There are five tiers of these. You always get to choose from 2 armor/weapon types per tier. The problem is, you will just throw one armor combination on all units and then usually pick 1h weapon with shield. Although 2h weapons deal more damage, shields give better survivability at the cost of about 10% damage. Another problem are the templates themselves, as they don't really give you any freedom to experiment since they define what how much armor/which weapons the unit can use.
AI: At times I was not even sure the AI was there. It wasn't making any progress towards victory conditions, never tried to attack me, not even a sneak attack. No diplomatic interactions from their side at all apart from outright laughable demands. No alliances were offered or accepted even though there is the option to. When I finally attacked them, they just kept throwing armies of 2-4 units at me instead of amassing a single large army.
TL;DR
I could write on for quite some time, but because this is already too long I will leave just the major things. I think the reason I don't really like this game might be me. Having played Civs 3-6 as well as Endless Space, it feels like this game doesn't add anything new. It tries to blend these things together, but ultimately fails and the mechanics from both are inferior to the original games. If you're new to 4X games or haven't played either Civ or Endless Space, I don't see why you shouldn't give this a go. If you have experience with both, then this game isn't for you.