I really love Endless Legend, Dungeon of the Endless, and Endless Space 2. I generally liked Humankind, but Endless Legend 2 – as it currently stands – looks like a step in the wrong direction.
It falls short of the first game in design (EL2's graphics are better though), atmosphere, gameplay, and even, damn it, music.
The map and the game itself are visually very poor compared to the first game. I understand why this was done. Together with the Tidefall system, it's a kind of equalizer for capital starting positions, but I can't say it makes the game more interesting.
Endless Legend 1 had enormous visual variety in terms of biomes and anomalies. The anomalies themselves truly looked, well, anomalous – something interesting and unusual. Each anomaly had a gorgeous 2D artwork showing it in all its glory. In EL2, anomalies might just be hippos in a puddle or some bugs on branches, and there are no 2D artworks at all :\
Heroes, buildings, events, quests – all of that has also lost the luxurious visuals of the first game and now, at best, features character figures standing against a blank background, chatting with each other. Honestly, the decision to turn quests from descriptive stories into dialogues is highly questionable. Personification isn't needed in this type of game – it feels more like a strange attempt at a visual novel.
The UI – it's just bad. Especially the city interface. Why they decided to split everything you can build into a bunch of tabs is a mystery. It's not convenient; you simply forget about those tabs. It's also annoying to constantly jump to the population screen to reassign citizens every turn.
Technology – there's too little of it (especially compared to ES2), it's slow and expensive, and it offers little of interest.
The only positive thing so far is the combat system, which has a clearer order system compared to the first game – but it was already implemented in Humankind, and there it wasn't burdened with "active abilities" that are honestly not very powerful, not very interesting, work on a "once per battle" basis, and are placed in a non-prominent part of the UI – you constantly forget about them.
I don't understand why they're trying to turn a 4X game into some weird homage to Heroes of Might and Magic, with too much focus on hero skill progression, forced relationships between heroes, and their personal "estate" that somehow ties the hero to a region. Unit progression with upgrades into new branches (again, like in Heroes) plays outright poorly. If your empire doesn't produce a ton of science and you can't unlock new branches quickly, your units hit a progression ceiling – and even if you fight successfully with them, they gain nothing from it. They don't become stronger with combat experience as they used to – they just stagnate. Because of that, you have to simply build MORE units and overwhelm with numbers, which means clicking through 15–20 units just to end your turn.
The Doomwraith system is frankly strange and annoying. You go to attack your neighbor – meanwhile a black-and-gold ball arrives and starts farting on your capital, lowering all parameters. You have to deal with them instead, and they're no pushover, especially in the early stages. And they keep pouring out of rifts – you, the player, want to close them, but the AI doesn't really bother.
Music has always been a very strong part of the Endless series, but here it's frankly poor, boring, and far from as unique and distinctive as in all previous games. I admit this might change by release, but right now, during gameplay, the soundtrack quickly becomes tiresome.
The game currently has very few interesting decisions and is very sick in terms of UI. It's outright bad. That's not even mentioning early access bugs. For instance, some of my units stopped responding to commands and just stood there – which is absolutely not okay in this type of game.
I'd like to give a neutral review, but since there isn't one, I'm leaning towards negative. Better go play Endless Legend or Endless Space 2 (if only they'd fix desync in those). EL2 right now is a very raw, very undercooked, and very frustrating experience. Buy it only if you want to support the developers – they do know how to make games (excluding Endless Dungeon – let's pretend it doesn't exist) – and there's a chance EL2 will become great. But the problem is that it's just a chance.
