Endless Legend
Overall Value: $20
Gameplay 0, 0.75
Length/Cost 0, 1
Controls 0.5
Stability 1
Video 1
Story/Development 0.5
Unique 0.5
Evolving Gameplay 0
Audio 0.5
Next Gen 0.5
OVERALL 4.5-6.25
Length/Cost 0, 1
Controls 0.5
Stability 1
Video 1
Story/Development 0.5
Unique 0.5
Evolving Gameplay 0
Audio 0.5
Next Gen 0.5
OVERALL 4.5-6.25
Gameplay: 0, 0.75
Everyone else: 0/1
This game has a target audience that is about as small as… Well, let’s just say it is very small. There are a lot of things that are not done well enough in this game with a handful of other items that are done terribly wrong with a sprinkling of “wtf were they thinking?” on top of some absolutely amazing graphics and world design. This is the kind of game where they have to sell it with screen shots and pictures because those are done to a fantastic degree while leaving out the details. “Endless Legend gives 4x games a kick in the butt!” and I ask, how? They added a new battle system in this game which is just terrible, so terrible! Forums are flooded with just how bad and time consuming this battle system is and the answer across the board? “Auto-battle”. So what is different between a civilization game where you attack and it automatically fights for you or a game like this where 80%+ of the people who play it just CLICK “auto-battle”? I could go on and on about how each “new and unique faction” has only three unique units per faction and the rest of the units you get are acquired through “independent mini factions” which everyone has access to, or about how their tech tree MAKES you learn technologies that you don’t even want to learn before you can advance in age so that everyone/every play through is 100000% the same, or about how certain unique factions are blocked from use period, but that would just be a waste of time- everyone that wants to believe something will already believe it regardless of what is said. The truth is that this game takes a lot from a wide spread of 4x games and doesn’t do ANYTHING well and didn’t even attempt to give 4x games a kick in the butt- city building/expansion/combat/technology/quests are all moderate to weak across the board compared to other 4x games.
You love 4x games+ aggressive playstyles+ have hours upon hours to learn the game: 0.75/1
By “having hours and hours to learn the game” I really mean at least 25 hours to even grasp what is going on. You will play the HORRIBLE tutorial and come out of it with your eyes swollen, it will be like drinking from a fire hydrant, and then you go play the game on normal and get torn to pieces- even if you are familiar with 4x games. 10+ hours later you try your next play through, you know more now but you still damper back the difficulty and decide to only do auto-battles this go around. If you are lucky this time you will figure out that there really isn’t 10 different ways to win the game, there is only one way to win the game- exploiting the AI and attacking the entire game. You want to play this game like any other 4x game- build wide or build tall- you will eventually get overwhelmed every time by an enemy army that is all lv 10 across the board. You see, attacking non-stop you build an army of lv 5-10+ troops which by the end of the game will and can destroy 60+ enemy units without taking a single point of damage and the same time the AI will not invade and attack your unguarded cities if you are in their lands attacking them. So what you do is decide to play again with this tactic in mind and play on normal; you absolutely destroy the game and it is so ridiculously easy you wonder if you just didn’t understand the game before. So you play again on normal but change tactics, maybe even factions (the dragons and dust knights are both ridiculously easy) and watch once again as you get destroyed. So at this point in time you have plugged in close to 50 hours of game play and you finally understand the game, but how much fun is it? Each and every play through from this point on (even on harder difficulties) will be exactly the same, even the same quests, and you will really only be able to play with one playstyle as the others will just lose out every, single, time. So bottom line in this regard is that if you don’t like aggressive playstyle (it is 500x easier to just take over an enemy city than it is to build a settler and build your own city) and don’t have hours upon hours to actually understand the game, even if you love 4x games this game will not be enjoyable.
Length/Cost: 0, 1
Everyone else: 0/1
Everyone else will stop playing the game or return it for a refund- obviously not getting their time/money out of it.
Those that enjoy the game play: 1/1
You enjoy the gameplay as described above you will put 50+ hours into the game before you even understand what is going on, ie. remember all the different bonuses and how things even work.
Controls: 0.5
This should not be a difficult thing for a 4x game to get right, Endless Legend did not. You can play the entire game without even touching your keyboard, seriously no joke. Do they even have “confirm movement”? Nope, you accidently click on the wrong location and you will spend your entire 4x days’ worth of movement automatically. And combat? Don’t even get me started on how crappy the controls are during combat- THERE ARE NONE! You can tell your army to move or to attack, not both, and the order in which their initiative clicks in is when they will even attempt to do whatever it is that you tried to tell them what to do. 80%+ of people just click “auto-battle”, especially if you are playing as the dragons and have a healer for a hero, you literally can take on anyone the entire game and not even take damage. Bottom line is that if you play auto-battle you will avoid 75% of the terrible controls but will not rid yourself of them entirely...
Stability: 1
You know I have read some things about stability being a problem but on my high end system the game ran flawlessly- even loading screens were milliseconds. Based on a system that can and is designed to play games you shouldn’t have a problem with this game- if you are however playing games on a toaster the problem isn’t the game, it is your toaster.
Video: 1
Best part of the game hands down, great visual art. Could there have been more? Absolutely! For some reason you couldn’t see when your soldiers/heroes put on armor? That was lame! Also some things like the Fallen Lords looking amazing in pictures and looking awkward in game was also somewhat of a letdown but other than that the graphics and look was unique and was done well. Playing on ultra the game looked great.
Story/Development: 0.5
Most 4x games do not have great story or development, most have great early games (micromanaging) and fail end game (don’t transition to macro managing). This game is no different. At first the individual “story” if you can call it that, of each faction is interesting but otherwise obsolete- it doesn't make any sense because there is no back story and it doesn't even matter because it is never brought up again as the game progresses on.
Unique: 0.5
I am being generous with a 0.5, let’s make that clear upfront. In a game genre that is as saturated as the 4x genre is it is important, paramount, that developers understand how to make a game. 50% of the game should be things that have been done RIGHT in the genre that should not be changed, added to, removed, etc, at all. 25% of your game should be things that you are adding to existing things in the genre to make them better, tweaking them, adding new content, new ideas, etc. The last 25% of your time should be spent removing things from the genre that don’t work, are not fun, could be done better, etc. Endless Legend is 25% of what you do know from 4x games that you do not like put in (untouched and not even looked at) block for block directly into the game, 50% tweaked content that should not have even been touched as it was what actually worked in every other 4x game, and 25% new content that is broken (ie. the new “combat simulator”).
Evolving Gameplay: 0
What made these games great has been stripped entirely from this game. You want to build wide? You want to build tall? You want to purely research war tech and go on the offensive? You want to research purely science improvements? All stripped from the game. The game is set up with each “time period” or “era” having anywhere from 10-16 techs in that area broken up into four branches, war, economy, glory, and science. In order to advance to the next era you have to research at least 10 from the previous era. Let me repeat that, you have to unlock at least 10 from that era to allow yourself to move to the next era. What does this mean? It means that you are not choosing techs that work best for you strategy, you are in fact NOT choosing the 1-6 techs that are totally worthless in each era and everyone looks exactly the same… Also everything is linear, not era based, meaning that to research your first tech it will cost you 10 science and to unlock your 100th tech it will cost you 1,000,000 science- regardless if that 100th tech you research is an era #1 tech that you just never picked up. What does this create? It creates a system that makes you only pick 10 from each era and NEVER go back to that era EVER again because it will punish you for doing so- what does that create? A game where each and every play through is identical to your last, you in fact can and will click in the 10 tech’s that you wish to learn in era 1 (I want this tech, then this tech next, ect ect) all at once and forget about science altogether until you reach the next era in which you will click in the next 10 that you have memorized in the best optimized order and there you go. What you have in the end is a game that is as stagnant as it is repetitive.
Audio: 0.5
Other than your typical half a dozen Enya-esque songs that play while the game is going on and the few (very few) sound effects, this game is sparse in the sound department. Unlike a Civilization game that at least has different music for different civilizations this game has the same half a dozen songs and weak sound. I suppose they thought that they could get away with sound being weak in this genre? Although the “audio” department of a video game as of late doesn't seem to actually be that big of deal- take Divinity Original Sin for example, a great game with relatively weak sound that did extremely well. In fact if the gameplay is good enough people when reviewing passionately vs reviewing objectively will just say the sound was “great!” even though it wasn't- regardless the sound wasn’t great in this game.
Next Gen: 0.5
I’d give it a 0.5 just because of how well it ran on an upgraded system. The graphics held and it didn’t lag while giving super amazing loading speed- as far as next gen games go that I do believe is a must. For the most part games that have come out recently are riddled with errors and are ported to half a dozen different platforms- my idea of next gen doesn’t include this and for that this developer has my thanks. Unfortunately that is where the next gen dies and the “in with the old we have seen a million times” comes into play. If you have played 4x games before there will be nothing really new for you and if you have played some much better 4x games (Age of Wonders, Civilization II, etc) you will find that they have taken many steps backwards.
Bottom Line
If you absolutely love 4x games and have countless hours to pour into this title I would still recommend waiting for the game to go on a sale and picking it up for $20, that way you will still get your money’s worth out of the game and it will limit your feelings of disappointment. For everyone else I would strongly suggest “buying at your own risk” because this is not the 4x game that I would suggest as an “entry point” into the genre. If you are new to the 4x genre I would point you to two games- Civilization Revolution and Age of Wonders- depending on whether or not you like “realistic worlds” or “fantasy worlds” as both are great entry points. Endless Legend is not a good entry point for anyone into the 4x genre and really shouldn’t be on anyone’s top 10 list of best 4x games of all time, because of these reasons it would be hard to ever “recommend” the game as the 4x genre is super saturated with classic games. Is this a terrible game? Not by a long shot! If this game was the only 4x game around would I recommend it? Possibly…
The biggest problem this game has to overcome is how the developers went about attacking the 4x genre in general. When making a game that is in a new pioneering genre the rules are slightly different, but for a game going into a genre that is already strong there are some simple rules to follow or you will run into problems. This is how a game going into a strong genre should go about its development:
Everyone else: 0/1
This game has a target audience that is about as small as… Well, let’s just say it is very small. There are a lot of things that are not done well enough in this game with a handful of other items that are done terribly wrong with a sprinkling of “wtf were they thinking?” on top of some absolutely amazing graphics and world design. This is the kind of game where they have to sell it with screen shots and pictures because those are done to a fantastic degree while leaving out the details. “Endless Legend gives 4x games a kick in the butt!” and I ask, how? They added a new battle system in this game which is just terrible, so terrible! Forums are flooded with just how bad and time consuming this battle system is and the answer across the board? “Auto-battle”. So what is different between a civilization game where you attack and it automatically fights for you or a game like this where 80%+ of the people who play it just CLICK “auto-battle”? I could go on and on about how each “new and unique faction” has only three unique units per faction and the rest of the units you get are acquired through “independent mini factions” which everyone has access to, or about how their tech tree MAKES you learn technologies that you don’t even want to learn before you can advance in age so that everyone/every play through is 100000% the same, or about how certain unique factions are blocked from use period, but that would just be a waste of time- everyone that wants to believe something will already believe it regardless of what is said. The truth is that this game takes a lot from a wide spread of 4x games and doesn’t do ANYTHING well and didn’t even attempt to give 4x games a kick in the butt- city building/expansion/combat/technology/quests are all moderate to weak across the board compared to other 4x games.
You love 4x games+ aggressive playstyles+ have hours upon hours to learn the game: 0.75/1
By “having hours and hours to learn the game” I really mean at least 25 hours to even grasp what is going on. You will play the HORRIBLE tutorial and come out of it with your eyes swollen, it will be like drinking from a fire hydrant, and then you go play the game on normal and get torn to pieces- even if you are familiar with 4x games. 10+ hours later you try your next play through, you know more now but you still damper back the difficulty and decide to only do auto-battles this go around. If you are lucky this time you will figure out that there really isn’t 10 different ways to win the game, there is only one way to win the game- exploiting the AI and attacking the entire game. You want to play this game like any other 4x game- build wide or build tall- you will eventually get overwhelmed every time by an enemy army that is all lv 10 across the board. You see, attacking non-stop you build an army of lv 5-10+ troops which by the end of the game will and can destroy 60+ enemy units without taking a single point of damage and the same time the AI will not invade and attack your unguarded cities if you are in their lands attacking them. So what you do is decide to play again with this tactic in mind and play on normal; you absolutely destroy the game and it is so ridiculously easy you wonder if you just didn’t understand the game before. So you play again on normal but change tactics, maybe even factions (the dragons and dust knights are both ridiculously easy) and watch once again as you get destroyed. So at this point in time you have plugged in close to 50 hours of game play and you finally understand the game, but how much fun is it? Each and every play through from this point on (even on harder difficulties) will be exactly the same, even the same quests, and you will really only be able to play with one playstyle as the others will just lose out every, single, time. So bottom line in this regard is that if you don’t like aggressive playstyle (it is 500x easier to just take over an enemy city than it is to build a settler and build your own city) and don’t have hours upon hours to actually understand the game, even if you love 4x games this game will not be enjoyable.
Length/Cost: 0, 1
Everyone else: 0/1
Everyone else will stop playing the game or return it for a refund- obviously not getting their time/money out of it.
Those that enjoy the game play: 1/1
You enjoy the gameplay as described above you will put 50+ hours into the game before you even understand what is going on, ie. remember all the different bonuses and how things even work.
Controls: 0.5
This should not be a difficult thing for a 4x game to get right, Endless Legend did not. You can play the entire game without even touching your keyboard, seriously no joke. Do they even have “confirm movement”? Nope, you accidently click on the wrong location and you will spend your entire 4x days’ worth of movement automatically. And combat? Don’t even get me started on how crappy the controls are during combat- THERE ARE NONE! You can tell your army to move or to attack, not both, and the order in which their initiative clicks in is when they will even attempt to do whatever it is that you tried to tell them what to do. 80%+ of people just click “auto-battle”, especially if you are playing as the dragons and have a healer for a hero, you literally can take on anyone the entire game and not even take damage. Bottom line is that if you play auto-battle you will avoid 75% of the terrible controls but will not rid yourself of them entirely...
Stability: 1
You know I have read some things about stability being a problem but on my high end system the game ran flawlessly- even loading screens were milliseconds. Based on a system that can and is designed to play games you shouldn’t have a problem with this game- if you are however playing games on a toaster the problem isn’t the game, it is your toaster.
Video: 1
Best part of the game hands down, great visual art. Could there have been more? Absolutely! For some reason you couldn’t see when your soldiers/heroes put on armor? That was lame! Also some things like the Fallen Lords looking amazing in pictures and looking awkward in game was also somewhat of a letdown but other than that the graphics and look was unique and was done well. Playing on ultra the game looked great.
Story/Development: 0.5
Most 4x games do not have great story or development, most have great early games (micromanaging) and fail end game (don’t transition to macro managing). This game is no different. At first the individual “story” if you can call it that, of each faction is interesting but otherwise obsolete- it doesn't make any sense because there is no back story and it doesn't even matter because it is never brought up again as the game progresses on.
Unique: 0.5
I am being generous with a 0.5, let’s make that clear upfront. In a game genre that is as saturated as the 4x genre is it is important, paramount, that developers understand how to make a game. 50% of the game should be things that have been done RIGHT in the genre that should not be changed, added to, removed, etc, at all. 25% of your game should be things that you are adding to existing things in the genre to make them better, tweaking them, adding new content, new ideas, etc. The last 25% of your time should be spent removing things from the genre that don’t work, are not fun, could be done better, etc. Endless Legend is 25% of what you do know from 4x games that you do not like put in (untouched and not even looked at) block for block directly into the game, 50% tweaked content that should not have even been touched as it was what actually worked in every other 4x game, and 25% new content that is broken (ie. the new “combat simulator”).
Evolving Gameplay: 0
What made these games great has been stripped entirely from this game. You want to build wide? You want to build tall? You want to purely research war tech and go on the offensive? You want to research purely science improvements? All stripped from the game. The game is set up with each “time period” or “era” having anywhere from 10-16 techs in that area broken up into four branches, war, economy, glory, and science. In order to advance to the next era you have to research at least 10 from the previous era. Let me repeat that, you have to unlock at least 10 from that era to allow yourself to move to the next era. What does this mean? It means that you are not choosing techs that work best for you strategy, you are in fact NOT choosing the 1-6 techs that are totally worthless in each era and everyone looks exactly the same… Also everything is linear, not era based, meaning that to research your first tech it will cost you 10 science and to unlock your 100th tech it will cost you 1,000,000 science- regardless if that 100th tech you research is an era #1 tech that you just never picked up. What does this create? It creates a system that makes you only pick 10 from each era and NEVER go back to that era EVER again because it will punish you for doing so- what does that create? A game where each and every play through is identical to your last, you in fact can and will click in the 10 tech’s that you wish to learn in era 1 (I want this tech, then this tech next, ect ect) all at once and forget about science altogether until you reach the next era in which you will click in the next 10 that you have memorized in the best optimized order and there you go. What you have in the end is a game that is as stagnant as it is repetitive.
Audio: 0.5
Other than your typical half a dozen Enya-esque songs that play while the game is going on and the few (very few) sound effects, this game is sparse in the sound department. Unlike a Civilization game that at least has different music for different civilizations this game has the same half a dozen songs and weak sound. I suppose they thought that they could get away with sound being weak in this genre? Although the “audio” department of a video game as of late doesn't seem to actually be that big of deal- take Divinity Original Sin for example, a great game with relatively weak sound that did extremely well. In fact if the gameplay is good enough people when reviewing passionately vs reviewing objectively will just say the sound was “great!” even though it wasn't- regardless the sound wasn’t great in this game.
Next Gen: 0.5
I’d give it a 0.5 just because of how well it ran on an upgraded system. The graphics held and it didn’t lag while giving super amazing loading speed- as far as next gen games go that I do believe is a must. For the most part games that have come out recently are riddled with errors and are ported to half a dozen different platforms- my idea of next gen doesn’t include this and for that this developer has my thanks. Unfortunately that is where the next gen dies and the “in with the old we have seen a million times” comes into play. If you have played 4x games before there will be nothing really new for you and if you have played some much better 4x games (Age of Wonders, Civilization II, etc) you will find that they have taken many steps backwards.
Bottom Line
If you absolutely love 4x games and have countless hours to pour into this title I would still recommend waiting for the game to go on a sale and picking it up for $20, that way you will still get your money’s worth out of the game and it will limit your feelings of disappointment. For everyone else I would strongly suggest “buying at your own risk” because this is not the 4x game that I would suggest as an “entry point” into the genre. If you are new to the 4x genre I would point you to two games- Civilization Revolution and Age of Wonders- depending on whether or not you like “realistic worlds” or “fantasy worlds” as both are great entry points. Endless Legend is not a good entry point for anyone into the 4x genre and really shouldn’t be on anyone’s top 10 list of best 4x games of all time, because of these reasons it would be hard to ever “recommend” the game as the 4x genre is super saturated with classic games. Is this a terrible game? Not by a long shot! If this game was the only 4x game around would I recommend it? Possibly…
The biggest problem this game has to overcome is how the developers went about attacking the 4x genre in general. When making a game that is in a new pioneering genre the rules are slightly different, but for a game going into a genre that is already strong there are some simple rules to follow or you will run into problems. This is how a game going into a strong genre should go about its development:
Endless Legend however went about it in this way:
It is only fair that I give some examples of how this happened to sum it up.
Examples of things they changed that didn’t need to change and in fact made things much, much worse.
I. Settlers cost population (old way) vs. settlers cost population and also stop population growth while being built while also making your civilization angry (E.L.)
II. Technologies cost science to learn and progressively more complex technologies cost more science (old way) vs. technologies cost progressively more science to learn every technology learned regardless of if it is a lv 1 technology or a lv 6 technology (E.L.)
Examples of things they added but were broken.
I. New battle system; total lack of control, total lack on tactics, 80% of people who play the game just use “auto-battle”
II. New way to win the game, including a quest system; total lack of balance, conquest is extremely over powered and will win the game 100% of the time so new forms of winning really are only ever achieved after a conquest victory anyway.
Examples of keeping things that were broken in the game:
I. Early-Mid game is fun, Mid-End game is a bore; Endless Legend is just as bad, if not worse than any other 4x game on the market in this regard. Early game will be fun, mid game will slow down, and by the end you are wondering if you should just start a new game…
II. Most of the map/world never gets discovered/expanded on; this game takes it to a whole new level, with settlers and expanding via settlers being so costly your world will be very much empty- depending on your map size you could see almost 50% of your world by the end of the game not even occupied.
Examples of things they changed that didn’t need to change and in fact made things much, much worse.
I. Settlers cost population (old way) vs. settlers cost population and also stop population growth while being built while also making your civilization angry (E.L.)
II. Technologies cost science to learn and progressively more complex technologies cost more science (old way) vs. technologies cost progressively more science to learn every technology learned regardless of if it is a lv 1 technology or a lv 6 technology (E.L.)
Examples of things they added but were broken.
I. New battle system; total lack of control, total lack on tactics, 80% of people who play the game just use “auto-battle”
II. New way to win the game, including a quest system; total lack of balance, conquest is extremely over powered and will win the game 100% of the time so new forms of winning really are only ever achieved after a conquest victory anyway.
Examples of keeping things that were broken in the game:
I. Early-Mid game is fun, Mid-End game is a bore; Endless Legend is just as bad, if not worse than any other 4x game on the market in this regard. Early game will be fun, mid game will slow down, and by the end you are wondering if you should just start a new game…
II. Most of the map/world never gets discovered/expanded on; this game takes it to a whole new level, with settlers and expanding via settlers being so costly your world will be very much empty- depending on your map size you could see almost 50% of your world by the end of the game not even occupied.