TL;DR: Gorgeous. Overpriced. Shallow. Sanitized.
The game is pretty both graphically and narratively, but there's not much of it. Looks less like a proper 4x game and more like a custom scenario/proof of concept, which is extremely sad and disappointing, given it's Amplitude's fivth big 4x game with the highest price among all of them... And by far with the least scope, most boring gameplay (too long with little action), dull and sanitized mechanics...
Which is hilarious, actually: striving to achieve proper "fair" balance and not make mistakes they made before during the development of ES, EL, ES2, the development team created a bizzarre beast of the game where tools are limited, options are shallow but in the end balance is nonexistent, since all of the premade factions are put on strict rails and if you pit them against each other, no matter the initial state of the game, some factions will eat others 100% of the time... And this happens constantly: in a game with AI Cravers and AI Aspects, AI Aspects never managed to survive past turn 60 no matter the difficulty setting.
Same thing might happen in multiplayer, since if you're "on rails", counterplay options become nonexistent: going fully militant as a pacifist faction to counter aggressive one will never end up favorably for the pacifist one, you'll simply give up your tempo and resources just to survive and lose harder later. For the game to work, it needs to have some brave, brazen, broken mechanics... or at least some options for player to game the system, break the tempo chess gambit style (and there're certain small mechanics that are going in that direction: like one of your hero gaining pretty broken "Lone Wolf" keyword whenever you lose one of your big cities in a siege). I absolutely love Amplitude and their games: they're a lifeblood of 4X scene, innovating and creating something new always... Yet, since Endless Legend 1, they're constantly ruining thir own games during the development striving for "balance", to "weed out exploits". This only results in games getting shallow, dull, less varied and staying as broken as they were, but not in a fun way.
I honestly have no idea what the future holds for this game. Probably the fate of Endless Legend 2 will be even worse than that of Humankind. Yet, still, I cannot force myself to say that the game isn't worth your time. Is it worth your money? Eh, it's up to you to decide: some people paid 200+ bucks for AoW4 and DLC and never finished one game but still are happy with money well spent.
P.S. Well, at least they've been working on optimization: merely couple of months ago this game barely ran and now it's running buttery smooth in 1440p "pretty" settings. And I have a joke of a machine as you can see in the specs attached to this review (don't ask me why my machine has 27 GB on board: I keep wondering about that myself ever since I've bought it).
