ENDLESS Space™ 2

Fun 4X game as only host needs DLC for everyone to enjoy lots of fun empires and you can make custom ones

The game seems like an idea of a strategy game by somebody who hates strategy games. Though that might be the popular idea now. After 5 hours I thought the game lacked polish with it's awful UI. After 10 I thought the game was overly ambitious. After 20 I think the game is diametrically opposed to the idea of a strategy game. It's obtuse on purpose not because of the poor UI. It's mechanics are not overly ambitious but they lack any depth at all. The flashy poorly thought out animations and tactical combat are a feature to hide the absolute lack of any depth. The UI doesn't show numbers, there is no confirmations for actions, so to figure out what does what: Save, Do action, Check result, Record in notebook, Reload. The space battles are the definition of style over substance (assuming you think graphics from 2001 are style). What is the purpose of the closeup view? I can't change anything, why do I need this? It looks like ♥♥♥♥ and serves no purpose. It absolutely refuses to explain it's mechanics. How much experience is a system admin gonna get? compared to a fleet commander, compared to an explorer, compared to fleet battles. This permiaites everywhere. The tutorials are trite and serve very minimal purpose, never mind they trigger at weird points if at all. Wasted development effort on useless animations e.g. fleet battles, planet animations. They are just annoying, after a few hours I turned these off (at least there is option for some of them). The lack of confirmation on actions just kills it for me. I wanna know the path of my ships before they are permanently locked into flying to a hostile system (there is no non suicidal path finding in this game). Any fleet movements are of course locked on click (you can't turn around before next system). Half the time I'm not even sure if click does anything, provides more info, or does massive Empire destroying changes. Accidentally clicking a button to switch to a different political faction destroys empire happiness. And switching back does it again. I just wanted to compare the two options.

I think if any of the mechanics were ever explained, I might enjoy it. As it is, after being unable to figure anything out but the very basics after a few hours (even with extensive 4x experience) I have to say no to this one.

Хорошая, крепкая стратегия. Широкие возможности исследовать и воевать

I have sunk a lot of hours into this game, offline and online. Not sure that all the offline hours have been captured. Easy to play, has that "one more turn" feel to it. Is a 4x type game. Have not bought all the expansions, and still have a great time playing. Multiplayer with friends is easy to set up and get going. It's easy to lose track of time while playing and suddenly find out it's way later than I intended.

I have to admit, I’m not really a fan of this game. It’s somewhat enjoyable for a short time, but several aspects didn’t work for me. First, the ships on the main map are just small blue silhouettes, which feels underwhelming—especially compared to Civilization VI, where units are clearly detailed. The ships do look good during combat, but that detail doesn’t carry over to the main view. I also ran into occasional bugs. For example, the interface sometimes indicated that a ship was available to move when there wasn’t one. It wasn’t game-breaking, but it was annoying—restarting the game seemed to fix it. The tech tree is very large and filled with explanations, but the heavy sci-fi terminology makes it hard to connect with. In Civilization, research feels intuitive and grounded in real history, but here the concepts are so abstract that they become difficult to follow. I found myself reading long descriptions that ultimately felt meaningless. The map itself also feels quite empty. While I understand that space is the setting, it still comes across as lacking substance unless you’re really into this kind of theme. There are also some localization issues. When playing in German, certain words didn’t fit properly in the UI and were awkwardly split across lines, which hurt the overall presentation (this was on a 1080p resolution). Additionally, the number of quests, events, and technical descriptions can feel overwhelming. It’s hard to keep track of what’s going on or what I should focus on. The tech tree layout is another weak point for me. I would have preferred a simpler tab-based system with a clear left-to-right progression. The current circular design requires a lot of navigation, and I often ended up just selecting a suggested technology without fully understanding it. Overall, I think fans of sci-fi strategy games might enjoy this more. But if you’re not deeply into the genre, it may be hard to get immersed. That said, the artistic side of the game is impressive. The factions, colors, and overall visual style are well done. I plan to give it another try to see if my opinion changes. Right now, even on the easiest difficulty, I struggle because I’m unsure what to research or build due to the unclear descriptions. For instance, I thought I had unlocked “Behemoth” hulls, but I couldn’t find them in the ship design menu. At the moment, I’d say: Civilization is still the better experience for me. EDIT: After playing more I found more issues about the game. For me the small italic font is sometimes difficult to read. The font is very slim but the main problem is the background image which is used for it. Sometimes the background is as bright as the white font and it becomes more difficult to read. Sorry, but this could have been patched easily. But they didn't. I also ran into another bug: sometimes, if you open up a dialog/window in the middle of the round or right after it starts for you: a fight can break out. This way your UI is completely crippled since you are "in theory" still in your managemnt dialog but you see the fight. This lead to the problem that during the fight the weapons were not shown and the health was not shown too. After the fight I could not get anywhere but escape the game since I got stuck in an empty window/dialog thing.

it's amazing but the universe ends up feeling smaller than it should

Steam started hiding users' negative reviews and manipulating the review score of its products. They try to dismiss any negative reviews as "off-topic" to prevent customers from correctly identifying that what Steam is selling is slop. Steam also actively denies refunds for such products, while simultaneously encouraging users to waste their time submitting refund requests, that get silently auto-rejected. If the user persists with requesting their refund, Steam will assign their ticket to an Indian support rep who doesn't speak English to purposefully waste the time of the user. Even if the user is ultimately successful in obtaining their refund from Steam, Steam will never compensate the user for the hours/days of time wasted dealing with """John""" from customer support (real name Rajesh). Since Steam considers this behavior acceptable, they should be fine with receiving negative reviews on every single product they try to sell - in order to counterbalance the "deleted" legitimate negative reviews that they don't count towards review scores.

This game gets boring quite quickly. Perhaps it should be bought with all DLCs, but the base game plus a few extras leaves it with around a couple of hours of interest before it starts to become a clicking time waster. Some of the mechanics are good, and the graphics are also well done. But it lacks in re-playability and interest, with a poorly structured AI and little thought put into the end game.

This is one of the worst games I've ever played, it's just as bad as Stellaris and what the two games have in common are, among other things, completely confusing action options that are not explained, AI that behaves very strangely, parts of the game/resources/fleets disappearing randomly and the list just goes on.