14 DAY TRIAL // Next up in our Softpedia Game of the Year 2014 awards is the winner of the Best Strategy category, Amplitude Studios' Endless Legend.
Endless Legend is hands-down the best turn-based 4X game of recent years, managing to steal Civilization's crown and delivering an even better experience than Endless Space did.
While its space-themed ancestor provided gamers with the means of galactic domination, the freshest title from Amplitude has a much smaller scope, being concerned with conquest on a mere planetary scale.
The strategy title is set in the same universe, showing the impact of the ancient Endless race on the small planet of Auriga.
The game takes everything Endless Space did right and builds upon it, offering a rich, living world and sleek gameplay systems, alongside some much-needed innovations that make playing the game fresh and engaging.
I think that pretty much everyone expected Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth to be this year's top strategy game, but Endless Legend completely blew it out of the water, exceeding it on every imaginable facet.
One of the game's strongest points is the fact that it's oozing flavor, making you feel like you're part of a real place, with a handful of very different factions vying for the control of a world that exists just fine without them.
The developers took a page out of Alpha Centauri's design document when fleshing out the factions, making all of them unique in their own way, and they went even further, having their idiosyncrasies translate into actual game mechanics.
Playing each faction feels different, from the Roving Clans, traders that are unable to declare war and can simply move their cities around, to the Cultists, unable to expand beyond their home city, a beacon of faith, on a mission to convert all of Auriga.
Pushing the genre forward
Instead of making some timid first steps, Amplitude Studios provided a solid 4X experience with Endless Space, and Endless Legend manages to be a bold step forward for the genre altogether, with numerous innovations marvelously pulled off, and with a very satisfying marriage of atmospheric setting and gameplay mechanics.
It uses the same quartet of resources from Endless Space, Food, Industry, Science and Dust (money), and offers a similar experience. You start out small, with a city, a few loyal troops, and a desire for greatness.
There is a sense of purpose around everything you do. Endless Legend features quests that give you something to do and a direction to go into, with each faction following its own destiny, providing an engaging role-playing experience alongside all the crunching.
In addition to this, you can also gear units with equipment, level up your heroes and teach them very useful skills, and everything is spot-on, thematically.
Battles take place on the actual map, you simply zoom in and use terrain to your advantage, so positioning becomes really important, with choke points and elevation having to be factored in, in addition to the troops' combat stats.
There are changing seasons, and during winter, all movement is slowed and food production reduced, so you always need to plan ahead and mount your assaults, complete with potential plans for reinforcements, towards the end of the warm season, so the enemy won't be able to quickly dispatch armies to defend.
Cities expand visually and organically, and there are both costs and benefits to be weighed when deciding where to go and when, depending on what new resources you are able to get your hands on.
The world map is divided into regions, and each region can only have one city built within it, which means that you can't simply push your border by creating new cities near your opponents.
The tech tree is freeform and it delivers various bonuses to all imaginable aspects, from new buildings to new units and bonuses to production, separated into several tiers.
I think that the most remarkable thing about Endless Legend, by far, is how connected everything feels. Your faction has an unfolding story to explore, and every little choice you make has an impact on the game board and influences the path you are taking, from trading and diplomacy to expanding your cities.
Heroes can become either generals or governors, nearby armies can assist in battles, the strategic and luxury resources bring meaningful advantages to the table, and the visuals are outstanding, as is the music.
The fantasy world you are drawn into is far from being generic, with Auriga being a veritable bounty of lore, waiting to be discovered in every nook and cranny, from the interesting back stories of the factions and their actual in-game particularities to the descriptions of the numerous unique terrain features and anomalies you will locate around the map.
All in all, it's a complete package, and easily this year's top strategy title.
For more information, you can check out our review of Endless Legend.
