Endless Legend by AMPLITUDE is the game that made me into a huge fan of AMPLITUDE. Being their third game I can honestly say they have learned well and I’m proud to call myself a fan of them.

Endless Legend is what is known as a 4X game which means it incoroporates both Real Time Strategy elements – in this case the combat, and Turn Based elements – in this case everything else. I’ve described the game to friends as a ‘More in-depth Civ’ and while one can’t really compare the two games as they’re very different that’s what it feels like. At present there is four factions: The Dustlords, The Vaulters, The Necrophage and The Wildwalkers(there is eight planned factions with the community designing one: http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/content.php?417-Endless-Legend-Faction-Creation-Competiton-the-Biography-Poll) and none of the faction’s feel like a re-skin of each other; if you’ve ever played Endless Space you’ll know what I’m talking about. To take the Necrophage as an example: they cannot make peace, they must be at war. Which to me is an interesting feature.

What I think is a nice feature and a very unique one is that the world is split into regions. In each region you can only settle one city(which can be expanded out), each regions has its own anomalies and minor faction villages and it’s quite a nice feature if you ask me. Thing about regions is they’re your Empire’s land but that doesn’t mean your enemies can’t get into your land without you seeing them as fog of war still applies and without watch towers or units there you won’t see them coming. One nice feature as you can see below is that if you zoom out far enough the map starts to look like an actual map.

However the game lacks a working diplomacy at the moment. This is understandable as the game has been out for about two weeks in early access at time of writing but the ground work is there. It can be quite annoying to know that you can’t make peace and you’ll be forced into a war with an AI and the thing is the AI aren’t very tough once you get a hang of the game so it generally leads to you steam-rolling them within the first ten or twenty turns of the war and being done with it.

Combat is interesting. The Devs appear to have taken a “You can tell your men roughly what you want them to do but not exactly” by splitting the combat – that is the actual fighting, into two phases and you can only tell your men what to do prior to that phase. Yes this means that combat can be a little less tactical than some other games but it feels more real. You can also choose to auto-resolve the combat if you don’t have time for that noise.

You can also redesign units to an extent. That extent being what equipment they use. So you could for example have two of the same base unit type but one that uses a sword and shield for pure defense and another that uses a bow for scouting. At the moment the materials system is a little better as in glassteel and titanium – which unlock at the same time, glassteel is better one and in my experience isn’t any rarer than titanium.

Naturally as with these games you can research various techs to progress through the eras of which there are six but only fourth which are actually filled with technologies. Some of these techs are must haves and others can be completely bypassed but the devs have agreed to address that issue. There’s also a quest system which is refershing to see. As well as side quests each faction has a main quest going on which I have yet to be able to finish.

The game is, however, in extremely early alpha and while the Devs are working hard in tandem with the community there’s still a lot missing from the game. I do however recommend it; otherwise I wouldn’t have written this long, praising review. Considering the content that’s there even at this stage I’d say it’s worth the price but I’ll leave that final decision to you.

– Colonel Hatch

Addendum: I’ve recently been informed by reddit user /u/KFilho that 4X doesn’t mean what I said it meant, to qoute them: “Also, 4x doesn’t mean a game has a mix of tb and rt strategy elements. It simply denotes a game that has the 4xes: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate.”