ENDLESS™ Legend

Very good

A 4X game that has all the premise to be great. But suffers from trying too much but not too well.

Get it on a discount if you want to see a very interesting fantasy setting. That was impressive.

Pretty good and original 4X, peak Amplitude #1.

The DLCs are hit and miss, I'd recommend only getting Shadows and Tempest. The others are either straight up bad or otherwise add content that mostly makes the game more tedious.

Don't forget to grab the community patch.

Of all the 4x games I've played, to this day I still feel like Endless Legend is one of the best.

• Beautiful art and visuals, always making the game a joy to look at. The theme is such a breath of fresh air compared to history and space themes.
  
• Unique factions with meaningful differences. Not just minor stat boosts to mix-max for the late game.
  
• Combat that is both streamlined and strategic. You don't have to micromanage blobs of enemies to win wars. The game having plenty of neutral monsters allows you to engage in combat without having to go to war.
  
• Every faction have unique quest lines with entire paragraphs worth of story to read along the way. Good reads for the first time, though since they don't change you'll mostly be playing through it for the rewards and maybe win condition in future games. Early quests are focused on building your empire's strengths and late game force you to compete with other players, avoiding them being entire detached from other players.
  
• Peaceful and Diplomatic playstyles are valid and fun. If you don't want to play genocidal nations for no justified reason, it's so liberating to have actual choices in playstyle. AMPLITUDE also had the foresight in realizing that being peaceful playstyles can easily be wiped out by a single attacker. As such, being a peaceful/diplomatic player doesn't have you ignoring combat, you still need military to be able to explore the map, secure new regions, and defend your lands from neutral monsters.
  

• While not a huge deal, Auto Resolve for battles is questionable at times. While most games with this feature suffer this fate, it will occasionally throw you results so BS that you just reload the game and fight it manually. I've had six units loose to one normal unit, to which I reloaded and won the battle on the first turn before they even got a turn. The better way is to instead play the battle yourself and set all your units to automatic so the AI just plays it for you instead of trying to simulate the battle.
  
[*]Though the AI is serviceable, it's not the best and time hasn't helped (it is 10 years old to be fair). The AI doesn't always play its faction to their best strengths, and will often make some questionable army decisions. It doesn't consolidate armies very well, meaning it will often use volume of troops over actual strategic army builds. Since you can give the AI boosts to stay above you, it means wars with the AI can devolve into pushover easy or annoying difficult based on if how well the AI builds its armies.

One of the all-time best 4x games there is.

Fantasy Civ. Just one more turn...

Play it

If you love strategy based city builders where you raise armies to defend your allies or go to war with your enemies, you have found THE game. Play past the "end" of the game to achieve your own victory. Highly recommend!

On my Favorites list

It was a bit overwhelming at the start (played it on and off since 2019 (31 hours on record 2024) and it was a very steep climb compared to any CiV game. But, once you get the basics, it is just something about remembering.

Moving your army over the whole map is a bit hard, since you have no minimap so a great deal of scrolling is required, but I like the game. Not sure if I am going to thrust 2k+ hours in it, but it feels complete, as to all factions being different. In CiV you only care about the special thing a faction has, the rest is all the same, here the units and the basic mechanics are different per faction.

Still an absolute classic and dare I say masterpiece!

Great game. Plenty of fun if you like X4 turn-based strategy games.

One of the best Strategy Game, also name speak for himself in it?! :-)

Unplayable without the Community Patch (mod). AI has to get massive cheats in order to pose a challenge, so it is either a steamroll from your end or a steamroll from the AI mustering x10 resources than you. Only way to victory is through cheese tactics and exploits.

Many people complained about the battles, so let me tell you: it's less the fact that battles are boring and not strategic, but the biggest, most atrocious problem is your units AI pathing during the battle. Sometimes they have a mind of their own and just wander about, sometimes when you order them to move somewhere, an enemy moves to that tile first, then the AI goes "ah dangit, guess ill move backwards and end turn instead of attacking".

Without the Community mod, the easiest and most braindead way you can win on any difficulty is with a diplomatic victory and dumb trades. Very unbalanced and easily exploitable base game.

The save game function is completely non-functional and therefore the game is unplayable. You can play for hours only to find no trace of your most recent save, not even an autosave (which supposedly saves after every turn). Judging by the comments around the web, this problem has existed for many years yet the maker seems disinterested.

A turn based 4x game with an assortment of unique factions. Each faction has it's own strengths, weaknesses, unique mechanics, and special abilities and the game is not balanced around these abilities in such a way that each faction feels the same.

What this means is that each faction lends itself well to the pursuit of different victory conditions. This aspect of the game, trying out the various factions and learning each of their metas, is a very enjoyable experience.

Each faction has it's own unique army units and heroes. Heroes can serve as either generals for your individual armies or governors of your individual cities. You can recruit heroes from external factions and you can recruit units from neutral factions (i.e. there is quite a bit of variety). Each army unit can have it's loadout customized, with more exceptional items requiring more difficult to obtain resources. Even your heroes can be outfitted with weapons/armor/trinkets and have level up skill trees allowing you to customize their benefits. Each factions heroes have unique level up trees.

The neutral units come from minor factions that are present in every region of the game and can be assimilated into your empire for perks & neutral unit recruitment.

Gameplay feels somewhat like a mix between Sid Meier's Civilization series and Heroes of Might and Magic 3, although where this game is probably the weakest is in the combat department. It's not that combat is bad per se, but it is rather tedious. I find myself more often than not letting the game resolve battles automatically and the auto battler 90% of the time does about as good of a job as I could've done on my own.

All in all I've only beaten the game with 2 factions at the time of this review and I plan to keep playing to atleast experience most if not all of the factions (there are also more in the DLC which I haven't tried).

I'd call this a very low key turn based strategy 4x gem, it is definitely worth picking up if you're a fan of strategy fantasy/sci fi and learning curves (learning the UI and game experience isn't the friendliest).

One of my favorite games ever. The endless options of expanding and exploring the vast and varied fantasy world rendered with dazzling aesthetics make it a blast of an experience. Customizable units and multiple battle options from hand-fought to automatic allow the player to fight at their own pace. Endless Legend is the pinacle of singleplayer 4X and a unique experience no other game will ever be able to emulate.

Very slow and passive

Nice

one of the best fantasy TBS ever

Check my hours. Lots of fun.

One of the most fun 4x strategy games.

I love the very original post-apocalyptic-fantasy-sci-fi-winter-is-coming-setting! I also really like the many quests you can do, because this leads to you having micro goals instead of the omnipresent macrogoal of every 4X game, which is of course becoming the most powerful empire. Although I must say, some of the conditions for fulfillinf the quests are a little confusing, sometimes I thought I had done what I was supposed to do, but then I didn't finish the quest and other times I thought I couldn't fulfil it, but then it was suddenly complete. The factions are quite different in gameplay and tone and this makes for very different playstyles, which is also fun.

Very in depth.

Nine years old and it still outshines Civilization 6. Just got all the expansions for 20 bucks on a steam sale and this game is the best 4X strategy game I've had the pleasure of playing! I can't wait for a Endless Legend 2!!! I'll be first in line!

Decent game, combat is $***.

Yeah it's alright. Can be a bit slow

good story

Good game

Closest modern 4X to Masters of Magic (a favorite now-very-old 4X) that I've ever found! Pretty great!

Fantastic strategy game with in-depth systems, quests and combat.

this is a great strategy game

wish i got endless legend 2 instead of bad civ. the sutdios best game

If you want Civ, but with more micromanagement and less logical consistency and words not meaning what they mean in real life, try this game.

just makes me want to play endless space 2

Hexagon is the Bestagon. This game is great, then you play a custom broken faction and its just silly your neighbors are and then you can spread democracy.

This is a tough one...I initially just about gave it a thumbs down...forced myself to play a bit more and maybe now just about giving it a thumbs up though honestly I'm not sure I will play much more of it myself.

Is it a nice game? Yes
Is it good enough to be in my top 5-10 games and have me come back to play more? Probably not unfortunately.

Pros

Looks nice

Overall idea is pretty decent and the basics are done pretty well

There's a decent list of buildings to improve your cities

There is some balance between empire size and happiness to make you think carefully about expansion.

There are some nice touches e.g. you can add a building to the queue of all your cities, and I think it is good with the diplomacy that there is a bar to give you an indication of what is an acceptable deal to the AI (maybe some people will say this makes it too easy but I don't actually enjoy having no idea why a proposal was rejected etc).

I think the marketplace to buy heroes, resources is a good idea.

Always appreciate a game with a variety of victory conditions

I think that the luxury and strategic resources and boosters work OK for me.

Cons

I found the unit movement bizarrely frustrating because surely this should be an easy part of the game to get right - sometimes the unit was not moving and it's not really that obvious why the unit is refusing to budge (sometimes I just had to keep pressing). Similarly with trying to exchange units or heroes between armies, or units in and out of cities it just feels a lot more complicated and clumsy than it should be. I got quite irritated a couple of times with just trying to get my units to move around the map. I actually got discouraged from really wanting to move my units around at all because it feels annoying. I also found it irritating that once a unit has been built it just sits in the city and you have to go locate it, create a new army and move it out - it's easy to forget what units you actually have.

The unit thing was compounded by the fact that there doesn't seem to be an end-of-turn warning for units not moved yet. And of course new units are just left in the city so it's quite easy (for me at least) to completely forget. For me I prefer to have a warning for unmoved units + the option to "sleep" units (meaning I would only skip units I've explicitly decided can stay put).

Just too many quests and pop ups for me at the start of the game...this is not an RPG and I want to run an empire with mighty armies and cities with terrifying amounts of defensive structures and barracks and castles and other fun stuff not worry about where I can find luxuries to bring to a village or something. As I played a few more hours I started to just ignore almost all the quests and just attack minor faction villages because I can't be bothered.

On a similar note, I don't enjoy having to run my armies around to collect pearls, surely you could come up with some automated calculation where you get a range of possible outcomes for pearl collection depending on the territory you control + any pearl collecting improvements, or maybe you could have a unit which is designed & set to auto-collect within your territory or something. I just really can't be bothered running my armies around collecting gems for side quests, this isn't Zelda.

Some of the stuff with buildings feels a bit clumsy e.g. there are unique buildings which you can only have 1 of in your empire but the game doesn't give you any reminder (e.g. in Civ 5, I believe the game stops you from trying to build 2 copies of a unique building, so you can't make that mistake), and of course that means you can easily waste a bunch of time/effort if you are not that familiar with the game. And it is very frustrating when a building stops and it tells you that you don't meet the requirements but for me as someone new to the game those requirements are not always very obvious so I'm left trying to figure it out.

I didn't like the "combat" thing where you can control your units during the battle - I mean I like Total War for example where you get a proper battlefield and you can set your units up in formation so it feels like it is trying to be realistic but here I just didn't really understand the logic of setup/combat and it also just seems a bit weirdly unnecessary to introduce a combat mode which is kinda forced onto the overall strategy map (the scale of the battlefield on the map also seems a bit bizarre, though I suppose this doesn't really matter). In the end I just landed up hitting "auto" because I didn't like the battle mode, though of course losing an "auto" battle can have some pretty bad consequences. Again I just think other games have done it better e.g. Civ5 with estimated damage to each unit and in most cases with units of similar strength it takes a few combats to actually kill a single unit off.

Neutral

In theory customising individual units and leaders is a nice idea, thought it does start to feel a little bit like hassle. I don't really enjoy the level of detail involved in choosing unit armor and equipment in a 4x type game, and for the armor and equipment which requires strategic resources it's not immediately clear if this is a one-off or ongoing requirement etc.

The techs seem OK though I think it is confusing for a new player to be able (as the game goes on) research techs from different eras...it's pretty unclear to a new player whether it's best to work through start to finish or jump forward to better techs. I do think that I prefer the tech tree approach (where tech A leads to tech B, etc).

Overall

It's not a bad game, in fact I think it is quite a decent game, I'm just feeling that for me personally there are just games I think I've found less hard work to play. Basically I think my feelings boil down to - if I hadn't played the Civ series, maybe I'd be more impressed by this, but with Endless Legend my feeling is that a lot of the stuff they have tried to do differently to Civ doesn't actually work that well (for me at least), so although it's a solid game I'd just rather play Civ. But equally I will just about give it the thumbs up because I do think it's a decent game, and maybe there are some people out there who will enjoy it more than Civ.

Just play Civ 5 instead

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I started playing during early morning xmass, It's been 7 years later and I still get PTSD from the minor factions bum rushing me around turn 49. 10 out of 10 you wont see your family for years.

I think it will always cause me some frustration that this game is not more popular than it is, because I think it's great. It manages to form its own separate identity as a 4x game, unrelated to civ. Every single faction feels inspired and cool to play as, The fantasy aspect of the game in general feels very unique. And overall it just manages to innovate succesfully in a lot of fields than other games of this genre have not managed to.

Even 10 years later I still think it looks pretty great. If you are looking for a new interesting and unique 4x game to try with a good amount of soul behind it, this is an easy recommendation from me.

Boy, this is a tough one. I was struggling with my opinion on this game a lot and I want to point out that Endless Legend isn't a bad game. It does the Civilization-formula well enough, there are some twists in the different nations and races that are unique enough to stand out and it flows well enough to have that "one more turn" appeal. With that said, I just... didn't like this game very much. I really tried to find the fun as well, but it just never arrived. I'll try to explain why.

Let's start at the beginning. Or really, before the beginning. When you launch Endless Legend, you get a cutscene that is pretty hype. The planet itself is speaking to you and describing what the world is going to offer, it has some pretty art and great voice acting and it really got me excited to play. And then... the menu appears. I have no idea what they were thinking with the UI of this game, because it's just ugly. Going from beautiful fantasy vistas to a menu screen that made me think of CS 1.6 is not a good transition. It acted as a bit of a punctured tire to the momentum of that first cutscene and I became a bit put off. Still, this is where the game is the most exciting, as you read the biography of the different nations and start imagining the gameplay and the story they will offer you, which is nice. The world in the text is probably the best part of the game, which made the menu design even more of a headscratcher as it doesn't exactly capture you in the illusion.

So what about that story? It's the main thing that attracted me to this game, back when I bought it... what, five years ago? (Damn you, backlog!) So I was pretty excited about it, given that these kinds of games rarely features one. Thing is, even though the text blurbs are pretty detailed and do sport some decent writing, I can maybe understand why that is? The narrative for the different factions felt very manifactured to me. The flow doesn't feel based on what the characters would naturally do, but instead informed by the game trying to push you into different systems. The faction obsessed with gold and trade suddenly get a directive to take over the city of another nation, the exploration based nature faction get a task to do some researching etc. It doesn't feel based on culture or different perspectives on what's happening in the world, just on the game being worried that you haven't interacted enough with every single system. That's not storytelling, it's PR.

Which brings me to the gameplay and balance of the game. The different factions of the game have some pretty fun quirks. One can infect others with a plague, one can move its cities if you need to, one doesn't have food as a resource but uses gold as sustenance. The game took a chance on these systems and I like that. Sadly, that doesn't really make the gameplay any different between factions. If you know strategy games, you know the old formula; you expand, build workers, research upgrades and build units, more or less in that order. And, well, that's what this game is. No matter what factions you play, it's always best to expand early to get more resources, focus on building workers until you feel like you have enough, and then research every upgrade and build every building you can. From the factions I played there wasn't really a way to vary that basic gameplay, and that made the game pretty dull. Not only have I played it before, other games like Civilization actually had more variety in approach, even without some of the wilder choices of this game. When I realised that, the game slowly died from there.

Then the ending. Yes, as in singular. There are plenty of ways to win in Endless Legend, but unless I'm wrong, only one gives you an actual ending to the story, one which doesn't actually fit the faction's goal. Instead it's a set up for the next chapter in these games. It just doesn't feel right, because there is nothing in Endless Legend that justifies an ending that is just a lead into another game. Nothing is built here that would make the sequel exciting. Which leads me to ask: Why does this game even exist? If the next game is the goal, why not just make that one first?

If you haven't gathered, Endless Legend frustrates me. I'm tempted to be mean and say that all that works in this game is taken from the Civilization games, and everything they try to add ultimately fails in execution. However, I don't think that's strictly true. I think a lot in this game does work and its concepts do drag you along based on their promise alone. It's not uninteresting, just underwhelming. With that said, I still don't think that's enough for me to recommend it. Do with that what you will.