Now Playing: Endless Space 2

Endless Space 2 is my first ‘Endless’ game and what may be the first 4X game I’ve played in a decade or so. It’s a space strategy game with a customisable turn based campaign. There are 8 playable races, each with their own unique campaign mechanics, ship designs and play style. I wasn’t sure if I’d like Endless Space 2, but at the time of writing, I’ve completed four campaigns and clocked over 70 hours of play.

As I said in my First Impressions post, the tutorial aspects of Endless Space 2 aren’t great. The numerous pop-up messages do just enough to teach you the basics of managing and expanding your empire, but I do feel a more heavily scripted ‘mini-campaign’ would have been far more beneficial to new players.

You can customise nearly every aspect of your campaign – the size of the galaxy, the density of the star systems, the available resources, the number and type of rival empires and various other settings. You can also enable or disable specific victory conditions, or create your own ‘custom’ faction to play – although this aspect could be greatly improved.

All these options enable you to set up and play the game how you want, and each campaign will play differently as a result – as will your galaxy map, which will be randomised based on your settings. The downside, of course, to this random element is that it can play havoc with balancing between the various races. Where each race starts, their home system and their initial local resources can play a big factor in determining who comes out on top.

That said, this extensive randomisation and customisation lends a great degree of replay value to Endless Space 2. You can set up short, small, quick to play campaigns with a single specific victory condition. Or you may prefer a very long, massive galaxy campaign with multiple races all competing for various goals.

As far as the races go, I’ve only played as 4 of the 8, but of those I have played, each did feel unique and enjoyable in their own way. There’s obviously some races which play more differently than others but overall, it’s a very interesting mix of play styles. What’s more important, however, is the ‘personality’ of each race, which adds charm, humour and character to the game.

All of the races in Endless Space 2 have their own ‘story’ and unique quest chain to follow (or not, if you’d prefer). These provide background on the race and provide a neat narrative drive to your campaign. They are, admittedly, rather basic and not massively influential on your campaign, but they’re a welcome addition nonetheless.

One thing I would have liked to see more of is unique technologies for each race. Every race (with a few minor alterations) shares exactly the same tech tree. They all share the same system infrastructure and weapon technology, and it would have been great for each race, if not to have entirely unique tech trees, to at least have far more race specific buildings, ships and weapons.

But though they do share essentially the same buildings and weapons, how you expand with each race will be different based on their unique campaign mechanics. Ultimately though, how you build your star systems won’t differ much from one race to the next – at least it hasn’t with the races I’ve currently played as – and there’s a lot of scope to further enhance and add variety to the races in this area.

Building your empire in Endless Space 2 is a big part of the experience and you’ll spend a lot of time navigating its extensive UI, switching between various screens for economical, political and military stats. The UI is decent but could be improved. It would be nice, for example, for star system improvements to be properly broken down and listed separately by building type, rather than lumped together in a single, inaccessible blob.

Combat in the game is entirely auto-resolved but can be viewed as a rather cool simulated battle. You can set a custom formation for your ships, based on various tactic ‘cards’ you can unlock, but there’s not much more to it than that. If there’s one area that Endless Space 2 could certainly do with improvement, it’s the combat system, most notably in terms of ship and weapon variety. What’s currently on offer is rather sparse. The ground battle aspects could also be improved, as could the the implementation of the ‘hero’ characters, who exist as little more than stat boosts to either your colonies or fleets.

Visually, Endless Space 2 looks great, both in campaign and battle, but there are some performance issues, particularly when you’re playing in a large galaxy map, or during larger space battles. Music is great at setting the mood, and the VA for each of the race leaders helps enhance that important sense of personality whenever you deal with them diplomatically.

In terms of difficulty, I’ve not really had any trouble winning my campaigns, even when I knocked it up from Normal to one of the most challenging (though not the highest) setting. The competency of the AI has varied quite wildly between campaigns and from one race to the next so there’s room for improvement here too.

There’s also a few issues with bugs, most commonly with battles in my experience, when the auto-resolve doesn’t function correctly. There’s also some issues with quests not properly completing. As good as I think Endless Space 2 is, there’s no doubt that it needs some extra care and attention, some bug fixing and some performance improvements – in addition to fleshing out various aspects of it mechanics and gameplay.

Overall though, Endless Space 2 is a fantastic strategy game with a great degree of faction variety and replay value thanks to its extensive custom options. I’ve had a real blast with the title, and I’ve still got 4 more races to play. If they can fix the issues and enhance what’s already here, it’ll be a strong contender for my game of the year.

8/10