If there's one genre of game I've spent more time playing in the past decade than any other--more than MLGAM tactics games, more than sports games, more than quaint little European games about running a bus company--it's 4X. From Civilization to Endless Legend to Stellaris to Humankind, I've spent thousands of hours exploring, expanding, exploiting and exterminating, but as the calendar creeps closer to 2026 I don't know if I've ever felt further from the things I love about them.
I've written about this before: in my fading feelings for Civ VI, followed by the crushing disappointment of Civ VII. How Humankind is now merely OK instead of Not Great. How many of the newcomers to the genre have got nearly everything about it wrong. It really feels like something is going increasingly awry at the heart of the genre, and Endless Legend 2--an Early Access game I've been playing for the past week--is no exception.
To recap: the original was released back in 2014, adding tactical battles and some cool factional and narrative twists to what was even then looking like a genre in need of some fresh air. And it worked! People loved that game, myself included, and so fans have been hanging out for a very long time to play the sequel, arriving on September 22 in Early Access 11 years later.
The thing is, a lot has changed in those 11 years. After years of listing to port, Civilization appears to have finally run aground, and in the middle of that decade Endless Legend's developers, Amplitude, released their own wannabe Civ-killer, Humankind, a game that had some very cool ideas but which also robbed the 4X experience of a lot of its personality, and ended up being pretty boring as a result. I think of all Civ VII's missteps, the worst was that it copied the parts of Humankind that least needed copying. Sadly (if not surprisingly, given it’s the same studio!), Endless Legend 2 has now done the same thing.
Endless Legend 2 is a game that simultaneously looks gorgeous but is also overwhelming. That appears busy but feels meaningless, because so many of your endless (sorry) notifications are for the most mundane pieces of city-building. There's so much going on at all times, but I quickly found myself numb to the drudgery of progression, of endlessly (SORRY) encountering the same people triggering the same dialogue. Humankind had this same problem, in that watching all those units swoosh around on such a beautiful map is meditative, but not interesting.
I want to find whoever is responsible for modern 4X's obsession with adjacency bonuses and their resultant megacities and tell them just how disappointed I am. The enormous settlements you have to build in Endless Legend 2--just like those you have to build in Humankind, and Civ VI, and Civ VII--sprawl across half a continent, look ridiculous and even become gameplay concerns later on because, with so much else going on and gently pinging you constantly on the interface, and with 117 units gliding across the screen at all times, you can completely miss the fact they're under attack.
For all the issues I’ve raised thus far, Endless Legend 2 also continues many of the best things about Endless Legend 1, like asymmetrical factions and a very strong insistence on weaving story into the game. The former feels pretty limited right now (only five factions were available in the build I played, meaning you just keep running into the same leaders all the time), and the latter does a much better job of weaving the story into your games, down to turning dialogue options into victory pathway selections, which is a fantastic idea. But again, with the same story repeating each playthrough, and this being the kind of game designed to be played through a lot, it gets tired pretty quickly.
Endless Legend 2 also has maybe the single most fascinating 4X twist I've ever seen, in that you start the game on a reasonably normal map--some different types of identifiably Earth-like climate, surrounded by ocean--and then throughout the game these huge storms happen, after which the ocean gets sucked out and the amount of landmass keeps increasing in its place. In theory it's like Civ VII's map getting bigger at the exploration age, but in practice it's much more dramatic, even visually; while the original land area is full of grass and forests, the "new" land is a variety of weird alien undersea stuff. The first time it happened, I gasped. But like so many other attempts at 4X innovation, I'm not sure I'm into it in the longterm, because once the novelty wore off it made the map feel both crowded and indistinct, every game ending up a single chaotic mass of regions all sharing land borders.
One thing I did like without reservation was the way it continues to get right into the weeds of jacking the game full of fantasy RPG stuff. Your hero units can be levelled up and equipped with loot, but they also just pop up sometimes to have conversations. You can even build them little houses on the map where they can, uh, get married to other characters in the game? Which then prompts even more little dialogue sequences and hero perks? It's wonderful stuff, and really has you investing in the character of your best units.
Maybe my genre gripes are just a me problem, or at least a generational problem for others who have been playing 4X games for so long. I've been playing Civilization since the first game's release back in 1991; it's now 2025, so it would be totally normal for me to be numb to so much of the genre's bedrock. And yet, I still find myself drawn to older games built on that very bedrock, and have become increasingly turned off by newer games’ attempts to shift the genre's boundaries.
This has become a piece about so many other games, not just Endless Legend 2, because so many of these games have done the same thing. The two biggest studios making the two biggest series of 4X games, responsible for nearly all of its best-selling titles of the past decade, are both trying to take the genre to a place that I just...don't like.
4X games became a thing because they empowered players and let them feel things in a strategy game they'd never felt before. The feeling of being a small tribe, alone in an unknown world, facing the darkness. Of running into rivals who were passionate and erratic and memorable as characters, not just AI trading partners. Of the world you knew so little about feeling vast. And while there was management to be done, so much of the more tedious stuff was kept under the hood.
Firaxis and Amplitude's more recent games, built with Civ's own board game heritage in mind, have shrunk the borders of that world. Everything feels smaller, less like a planet, more like a game of Catan confined to your dining room table. And the numbers, whose obfuscation was once the point, are now everywhere. These are no longer games about exploring, expanding, exploiting and exterminating. They're about adjacency bonuses.
Which is fine to a point; the formula has been shaken up because it needed to be, I'm not questioning that. Innovation is good! But I had such high hopes for Endless Legend 2, given how much I loved its predecessor, so I've been bummed to see it fall into the same pothole as so many other big games in this space lately.
I don't know if things will always be like this, or whether they're just a consequence of the game launching perhaps a little too early into Early Access (I’ve played an early release of this build, which goes on sale on September 22). In 6-12 months’ time, who knows: Amplitude might add more factions and story options to the point where things feel more fleshed out and hang together a bit more elegantly.
Until then, though, I'm left looking at a game that promised so much, but has slipped on the same ol' banana peels, and also maybe launched a bit too soon. It'll take some time, and work, before I want to spend another whole week with it.
