14 DAY TRIAL // Next up in our Softpedia Game of the Year 2014 awards is the winner of the Best Concept category, Amplitude Studios' Endless Legend.
The first big thing that Endless Legend has going for it is the world design. It looks gorgeous, colorful and varied, with a ton of races, different units for all the factions, and the terrain isn't simply a picture on a hex grid but instead looks more realistic, highly stylized and very pleasant to the eye.
The world map has actual height differences that factor in fights and movement, but it's in the lore department that Endless Legend knocks it out of the park.
It's a great mix of science fiction and fantasy, a combination that's like catnip to me. I enjoy interesting and well-crafted worlds, and Amplitude Studios has done a very good job fleshing out the inhabitants of Auriga.
A rich backstory
You can pick from the descendants of a spacefaring race living beneath the surface, dragonkin, etheral vampire ghouls that live in suits of armor, or a necrophage hive of insectoid creatures, which is a few orders of magnitude more exciting than warmongering Mahatma Gandhi.
The different races all have distinct traits that stem from their backstory and translate into interesting gameplay twists, making you really feel that you're playing a different kind of game depending on your selection.
Each of the factions has a main quest to fulfill, you don't just go off into the sunset hoping for the best, you have thematically appropriate stuff to do, and everything ties in neatly due to the interesting bits of lore that are gradually unveiled as you complete missions.
Furthermore, the art direction is incredibly creative, with each of the factions' units looking radically different from one another.
Do yourself a favor and check out the videos on all the factions on the game's wikia page, and you'll be able to fully appreciate what Amplitude has created.
Mechanics
Endless Legend makes a bunch of changes to the 4X genre and they all seem to work, as if by magic. Traditionally, the genre is resistant to change, with players well entrenched into the same habits and paths, but Endless Legend aims to offer more.
Frankly, the things that Amplitude did were the things I was expecting from Firaxis or Paradox. Endless Space had a wonderful, easy-to-use interface, and fortunately, it made the transition to Endless Legend unscathed.
On top of that, battles pop up organically on the regular map, complete with nearby units lending a helping hand, and influenced by leaders and nearby terrain.
Neutral factions are represented by villages that grow over time, and once turned to your side by either force or diplomacy, they will bestow various bonuses to the region they're in.
One of the factions, The Cultists of the Eternal End, makes great use of them, due to the fact that they're a bunch of robotic religious nuts that can't create additional cities aside from their capital, completely changing the way to play the game.
You are able to upgrade heroes and make them either generals, bestowing great combat bonuses and even enjoying some rough and tumble action themselves, or governors, boosting cities' outputs and helping your empire grow faster.
But what is perhaps the game's biggest achievement is the fact that you can actually play it in a lot of different ways. Other turn-based strategy titles are usually about getting as far in the tech tree as you can without being annihilated, after which you can pretty much win fights where you are greatly outnumbered based on your superior ships or units.
Endless Legend enables you to play a radically different game, where you don't have to rush to certain crucial technologies or have a precise build order that you must follow for maximum gain, but instead you have to adapt to your civilization's strengths and weaknesses, and mold your strategy on its particularities.
If you want to learn more about it, you can read our review of Endless Legend.
