A currently unpolished mess, marred in a myriads of issues from bugs, half-baked systems to abysmal writing.
While the Tides/Monsoon mechanics offer an interesting switch, making exploration relevant up to midgame, other systems are incredibly barebones : diplomacy lacks options to leverage influence over other players, fortresses are a case of "done them once, done them all" and some win conditions can very easily become unobtainable due to circumstances out of your control (securing 12 fortresses for a win condition out of only 12 existing on the map makes no sense : each one can only be done once and some will be locked on another continent for 100+ turns where other factions will definitely get to it first)
Factions are rather distinct, both in mechanics and presentation : it goes a long way to give them very unique identities and make different playthroughs worth the effort. Unfortunately bugs, poor UI and unexplained concepts are a constant pain throughout. Units will simply not move despite no lack of move points, necrophages consuming space resources will seemingly provide no bonuses despite description to the contrary, so on and so forth.
Never such a fascinating setting has seemed so incredibly bland and dull, due to terrible narrative decisions. All quests are now narrated through dialog most often between a faction leader and their advisor, and most of the time following the exact same template for all of the factions. This unfortunately compounds into several issues :
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[*] Quest/Event dialog being reused for all of the factions make them all indistinguishable from one another despite what the game establishes as very distinct people and philosophies. This often leads to hilarious clashes of tones. Shoutout to the cannibalistic necrophage that would devour foes and friends alike suddenly having a mental breakdown over "war is sad".
[*] The very lacking presentation during dialogs and their tendency to drag on make them absolute slog to go through, making the skip button more than tempting on many occasions. Made even worse thanks to utterly bland and boring writing.
[*] Faction leaders have next to no personality and dull voice acting. You need only compare the necrophages leader to its cravers equivalent to make the former look like a whimpy cockroach trying to gnaw your kneecaps. They're less a symbolification of their respective factions and more a caricature at this point.
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This is even more infuriating when compared to its predecessors who managed to have their narrations both more immersive and less intrusive, while EL2 barely crawls.
EL2 has elements worth praising but just as many that plague the experience, some of them requiring a complete overhaul at this point. While there is hope Amplitude could turn things around, I won't be holding my breath.
