Endless Space 2

« Endless Space 2 isn't just a very solid 4X game. It's also quite the narrative experience. Every faction has a story to tell, and every game will see you playing to their strengths while learning that story. »

« Endless Space 2 doesn't sugarcoat the 4x experience, and it can be daunting when you realize that all 600 icons on the screen have a tooltip you need to read to make just this one decision. Despite all that complexity, none of it seems unnecessary, which means every one of those tooltips has essential information. »

« Despite a bit of a misstep regarding space battles, I have very little to complain about when it comes to Endless Space 2. Any bugs or other technical frustrations I had in the Early Access have disappeared with the full release, which also includes a whole new Faction that I can’t wait to play. »

« If you're looking for a replayable sci-fi strategy game to grab a hold of your man hours, then Endless Space 2 will provide you with all you desire. Endless Space 2 sets a new and beautiful benchmark for the 4X genre, masterfully laid out and something future 4x developers will enjoy learning from. »

« A beautiful, deep and fun experience that will take hours from your life… but you won’t regret it. »

« Endless Space 2 is probably the best videogame ever created by Amplitude Studios, a 4X strategic game with an incredible personality, a deep (and unusual, for this type of productions) storyline, and an almost flawless gameplay. A real gem. »

« Endless Space 2 offers hundreds of ways to play, an interesting player-driven narrative experience, and above all the addictive turn-based gameplay we've grown to love. »

« This is a deep sci-fi 4X extravaganza. Loads of beautifully and sometimes very subtle connected game systems make this the most atmospheric and most complex 4X in recent years. »

« A very good game: You can get the impression in the beginning, that the gameplay is straight forward, but later on it reveals its complexity. The ship builder for example has many options. The factions are very interesting and everyone of them has its own main quest to understand them better. This motivates to play another match with another race. In addition some races have very interesting gamestyle, some are classic, some are creative. The graphic is top. Music is good, but you need more tracks, because you will spend a lot of time in this game. So I played some of my music in the background. What is bad? It is closely connected to Steam and mods are recommended, especially a community patch mod and an AI mod. The AI is too passive and easy. The interface is bad: bad overview sometimes. »

« Very poor combat system. You can't command your units you just throw them in battle with a plan and the only thing you can do is watch a cinematic with your units and wait to see if they lose the battle or not. They promised for a big patch that adds more battle strategies etc we will see. The combat system in this game is so poor and ill conceived that feels like an afterthought. Also the game universe feels souless from the single player perspective. The first game had more details about factions and felt more unique and interesting »

« It's my first 4X game and probably the essayist to approach »

« This game is absolutely soulless. It feels like a group from an alien race found Earth, checked out our culture and saw some people play 4X games. Then they tried to make one, got all the elements in there, but didn't quite grasp what makes a game fun. »

« Très complet et profond en terme de stratégies et possibilités. Assez difficile à prendre en main pour les néophytes, le jeu se révèle agréable à jouer une fois les premières heures passées. De nombreuses races jouables (et + avec les DLC) avec chacune quelques spécificités de gameplay et des quêtes "histoire" uniques et intrigantes. On peux même personnaliser sa race en fonction de son style de jeu et plein d'autres options comme la taille de la galaxie, la difficulté, le nombre d'IA etc... Des dizaines et des dizaines d'heures de jeu à explorer la galaxie, créer des vaisseaux, coloniser des planètes, les améliorer, faire des combats, réaliser des quêtes et bien plus encore ! On regrette les options diplomatiques mal fichues avec des IA qui refusent trop souvent des échanges et accords si l'on veux jouer pacifiquement. J'aurai également aprécié + de cinématiques sur l'histoire ou le développement de certaines races, la quête de l'académie nous laisse sur notre fin présageant un endless space 3 ? ou au moins une suite pour la série de jeux Endless on espère »

« So dissapointing ; for the old-timer 4X player I am, ES2 looked like the perfect achievement. Until you realize it's an empty shell in terms of solo playing. and I'm a solo player. AI is so dumb ; AI fleet try to flee but get destroyed without combat because they can't flee a secund time... Nothing happen in terms of opposition unless you get to the last difficulty level or install an AI booster mod. this game is graphically superb and appealing but totally boring after 10-20 hours of play... And if you go on testing for another 100 hours like I did, you'll get confirmed. If They could implement SOASE engine with their graphic skin, that'd be wonderful ! »

« A solid 4x game for those who have the time and can get in to the finer details of it. Some improvements on the first and for fans of space exploration, settling the galaxies and fighting aliens it's a good time. »

« Endless Space 2 is a 4x game set in - you guessed it - space. While in principle a science fiction game, the game is, in truth, nothing of the sort. The descriptions of the various technologies are quite silly and many of the factions - like the Horatio, a clone race - are quite silly. But the game at the very least uses the veneer of such things to justify its nature. The game map centers around solar systems. Each system contains 1-5 planets, all of which can be colonized with the right technology. Initially, you can only colonize the nicest planets, but as you climb the tech tree you gain the ability to colonize everything, from lava worlds to gas giants. This adds a nice extra dimension to expansion, as researching specific technologies allows you to not only colonize more systems, but to add more population to existing systems. The tension between colonizing different kinds of planets and researching other important technologies leads to interesting choices in the early game. Each solar system you colonize is treated much like a city from another game; you build system-wide improvements and move your population between colonized planets within the system. One interesting aspect to the game is these populations. Unlike many 4x games, your population is broken down into various species of aliens. You start out with your own population and perhaps one kind of alien coexisting with you, but as you expand you can get other population types, either by taking over or integrating worlds that belong to minor races, by conquest of other civilizations' worlds, by discovering refugees who settle on your worlds, or even by proximity to worlds owned by other species. Each of these populations adds bonuses of their own, and getting them in sufficient numbers grants additional bonuses. Because of this, and the limited population slots on planets, there is additionally the ability to upgrade your systems with starports that allow you to ship your citizens between worlds, both to keep growing your population as well as to speed the development of new colonies and sculpt their demographic makeup. For being a game set in space, exploration is fairly familiar. The star systems are in "constellations" which have lanes between stars which enable travel between them; these act like continents of sorts. Later you develop technology that exposes wormholes between the constellations or which allow lane-free warp travel. Your exploration ships can be equipped with probes, which can be sent off blindly to expose more of the map or used in a solar system to perform expeditions, which can expose resources on planets, find new colonists, discover blueprints to design new weapon and armor systems, or trigger side quests or combat encounters. As you ascend the tech tree, you discover new technologies that allow you to build new ship designs. Unlike Civilization, you get to design these units, with each ship design having slots for weapons, armor, and utility components, all of which are unlocked by researching new technologies and sometimes from exploration. This customization can also determine how fast the ships go and at what range in combat they are most effective. The technology tree is also interesting in that it isn’t really a “tree” at all, but rather a series of concentric rings; you don’t need to research particular technologies to research future ones, but you do need to research enough on each “level” within a given technological sector to unlock the next level. As these levels unlock new functions and abilities, as well as some new sidequests, there’s tension between filling out your tech tree and pushing more advanced but slower to research technologies that will advance your overall progression. It is also possible to skip various technologies as a result of this approach, allowing you to customize your approach to the game but also possibly leaving you without various seemingly “necessary” things. Hero units are also unlocked over the course of the game. They can be assigned to systems to promote growth or to fleets and given custom ships to make your fleets of spaceships more potent or faster or better at exploring. They gain experience either way, and having a good mix of both is helpful. The quests are perhaps what sets the game the most apart from games like Civilization. Rather than simply building up your empire over time, you have a main story quest, where you make various decisions that influence the progression of your empire. Depending on your decisions, you can change your race’s bonuses, what buildings you build, what heroes you get, and whether your empire is more focused towards science, industry, military aggression, or making money. There are various objectives which you can sometimes even choose between to change how the plot of your quest advances. »