Amplitude Studios, a name that should be familiar to turn-based strategy fans for its hit Endless franchise of games. Outside of the Endless Legend and Endless Space series, the studio’s biggest attempt at making a splash was with Humankind. Now, as a newly independent studio, Amplitude is going back to its fantasy realm and releasing Endless Legend 2, its latest 4X turn-based strategy game.
While I don’t consider myself a diehard fan of 4X games, it is a strategy genre I get into a couple of times a year when I get the urge for a chill but engaging experience I can play in the background. Most of this has been spent inside Civilization V and Civilization VI. As for Amplitude titles, I bounced off the original Endless Legend quickly, which I remember was due to its janky UI, while Humankind didn’t hook me in even after giving it multiple chances.
I have so far spent over 25 hours inside the Endless Legend 2 early access build, exploring multiple factions and playthroughs in the world of Saiadha to see just how it fares up against others in the small but thriving genre space. I was pleasantly surprised about just how sleek and smooth it has been, often making me play deep into the night without noticing the passing time. The game is trying out some twists that I don’t think any other 4X game has had before, making the exploration and adventuring phase carry forward through the late game.
Here are my thoughts, as a casual strategy game fan, on Amplitude Studios’ Endless Legend 2.
Tidefalls shake things up
Saiadha, the world where all the strategy adventures take place, is a land full of oddities like magical cultures, ancient horrors, dead gods, and teleporting mountains, like all good fantasy realms. However, it’s the Tidefall that makes it unique. This is a calamity that befalls the planet after Monsoons, where entire swaths of the sea disappear to reveal long-hidden landmasses, suddenly connecting entire continents or adding land bridges between islands.
I had actually forgotten what Tidefall was exactly when I jumped into the pre-release review build, so imagine my surprise when the first city I placed on an ocean cliff for better ‘defense’ suddenly became an easily accessible prize that could be claimed from any side, and with an unfriendly neighbor right across the newly formed land. The oceans never come back to reclaim the land either, making the brand-new terrain a valuable and permanent addition to any budding empire.
From a gameplay perspective, it's an astoundingly simple solution to the 4X genre's issue of running out of land to explore and exploit by the midgame. Endless Legend 2 fixes this by simply making more land, which happens three times throughout a game. The deeper terrain that each Tidefall uncovers also has tougher AI patrols and dungeons to breach but also comes with richer land and rarer resources as a tradeoff for weathering the dangers and moving in.
The fresh gameplay opportunities that the Tidefall mechanic offers are wonderful, making me think twice about city placement, army movements, and chokepoints.
The Five Factions
At the heart of it, the gameplay systems of Endless Legend 2 have been very similar to other 4X games I’ve played like Civilization or Humankind: Pick a civilization, spawn into a randomly generated land, explore its contents, horde as many resources as possible, and if the empire wallet can handle it, have some wars on the side. Endless Legend 2 carries forward these same objectives, but with asymmetric factions that has their own methods of accomplishing them.
The early access launch carries five distinct factions, with a sixth on the way. Their dissimilarities make sense lore-wise, as almost every one of them is an alien to this planet. Thanks to the handful of available civilizations, Amplitude has managed to give each one a flavor profile that doesn’t repeat between factions.
For my first game I chose the most 'human' faction, the Kin of Sheredyn, a highly defense-oriented military civilization. Offering units with swords, shields, bows, giant armored sentinels, and, oh yeah, orbital lasers to finish things off. Outside of that, it was the standard affair of resource collection and gameplay I’m used to from historical 4X titles. I was traversing the world defeating foes with my shield walls. it was all rather familiar and good fun. After that experience though, I was not expecting the sheer number of different mechanics I would encounter when jumping into other factions at all.
The next game I went with the Last Lords, which turned out to be a spirit faction trapped in ancient armors. Having lost the ability to even see food, they need to feed upon this world’s currency as well as any living beings to advance the civilization. To top it off, there are actual spirit dragons in these armies. Yes, it’s quite metal and super interesting to play.
Like I said, these folk use this world's currency as their growth resource instead of food. Even from the start of the game I was scouring for ways to increase my money, as it’s how the lords bump up city populations to get faction bonuses. I could even forcibly ‘recruit’ the nearby minor faction populations and use them as fuel for more armored spirits, though this does make them rebel against their masters (that being me) eventually. While instant, healing also needs to happen inside friendly territory, and as you can guess, it uses money, so this had me keeping my armies close to my borders and only venturing out for hit-and-run tactics.
Then there’s the Necrophage hive-mind predators that just love killing and building armies out of corpses, with all of them spewing out of a single city, the coral-loving Aspects that just wants to cooperate with everyone and spread their influence to infect opponent minds, as well as the Tahuks, a science and faith combo civilization with a love for observatories and self-sacrifices.
There are faction-specific technologies to research, completely unique army types, city growth mechanics, and so much more. I already have favorites forming that I want to go through more campaigns with.
Having such major unique aspects for each civilization also means they lean towards their comfortable and predictable playstyles every time, especially when facing them as AI opponents. It’s not something I have grown tired of yet, but I do feel that some balance changes will be coming during early access to make them a little less predictable in different scenarios.
Armies, Heroes, and Tactical Combat
Combat is not a strong point of any 4X game I have played. Most of the time it’s a numbers game. If your army has a higher number than the other, it will deal more damage. Endless Legend 2 though, deals with it differently, in a way that Humankind players will be familiar with.
When armies meet or cities get breached, Endless Legend 2 uses the nearby terrain as a pocket battle map for all the units involved in the clash, offering a turn-based combat system that offers a chance to use tactical elements like the terrain, formations, passives, and active abilities. An army in forests get cover from ranged attacks, shield walls offer extra armor for nearby allies, horse charges deal more damage when running through multiple tiles before attacking, and so on. Only a few battles in, I was already making use of my own devised strategies to trap enemies and sacrificing weaker units to win battles, all making for a satisfying combat system that let me be as fast or methodical as I wanted.
All this is elevated by Endless Legend 2’s hero system. These are rare but special units from empires that have talent trees and equipment slots, letting them use extremely powerful special abilities during fights to turn battles. Personalization elements like giving them battle buddies and different tiered loot made me grow attached to each of my long-standing heroes and the high-level armies I sent with them everywhere.
However, let’s say I’m about to wipe out a civilization after hours of battling, and I’m not in the mood to do an intricate battle with them. No problem, almost any clash can be auto-resolved with a button, which calculates a result based on army powers and abilities, much like other 4X games. I have manually won battles that it deemed unwinnable and lost units in simulated ones that I thought were easy wins. Another nice addition is that even during manual battles, a helpful toggle let me let the computer also take over my units, making a fully automated fast-paced battle that goes turn by turn. There are just so many user-friendly options in this game that respects player’s time.
I found the enemy battle AI to be average. Sometimes it would use chokepoints effectively while raining magic and arrows on my weaker units to slowly whittle my forces down. But other times it would make mad rushes through bad terrain, letting me easily pick the entire force apart with well-placed abilities. I do enjoy both difficult but fair battles as well as quick and easy stomps, so I’m not really complaining here.
Gorgeous Visuals and UI
I mentioned in the intro that I bounced off the first Endless Legend because of the janky UI. Now let me say that the sequel's implementation might be the best UI I have seen on a 4X strategy game yet. Unneeded information can be tucked away easily. Useful notifications come with a turn indicator to show when they occurred, and many basic mouse functions like double clicking, scrolling, or drag and drop work exactly at the places I expect them to.
Moreover, the nested tooltips feature is the icing on the UI cake. Every helpful element that pops up when hovering the mouse can be locked (by holding shift) to read them properly without having to keep the mouse steady. The genius part is that hovering the mouse on a piece of text inside the original pop-up lets you go deeper and deeper into these information packets by locking them, forming Russian Nesting Dolls of tooltips. I was wondering why the game doesn’t have an in-game encyclopedia, but with this tooltip system, I was able to go as deep into mechanics or lore as I wanted to without any hassle.
The system isn’t foolproof. There are hints that need extra information or clarifications on features. Being an early access launch, there is even placeholder text and icons in several pop-ups. Even still, I wish this system gets ported into every strategy game from now on.
Bugs involving stuck quests, battles not beginning, stuck units, and incorrectly boosted loot (woo!) impacted my saves as well, at times stopping me from triggering the next turn. These only required a quick load of an autosave to resolve, which load up incredibly fast, but was still a little annoying.
Another one of the rough elements I found during my time with the game was during city management. Having more data to make decisions on what districts I should build would have been ideal, as the placement can benefit from structures and terrain surrounding it. Having to mouse over each building type and hoping it works out in the end sort of felt unclear, especially in the early game. The game also doesn’t say how many of each district have been built so far. From what I could see, the only way to find out is to zoom in and scan the models myself to see if I recognize the structures.
Despite still being in active development, Endless Legend 2 performance on my AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB paired with an eight-core Ryzen 7 3700X and 16GB of RAM, with the game running at 1440p resolution, was flawless. Using the highest available Fantastic preset, frame rates were stable around 140 with a zoomed out empire view. I also vibed with the music. Chill tunes with Hang Drums plonking along to violins in the background and never overtaking what’s happening on screen did well to never break my focus. My favorites would still be the Civilization series’ nation-specific instrumental tunes, but I can’t fault Endless Legend 2’s enjoyable melodies either.
Conclusion
Everything from the sleek UI with its nesting tooltips and the tough but fun interactive army battles to the gorgeous visual style of the planet Saiadha made this the most appealing 4X game I have played in almost 10 years. There are rough patches I encountered, like missing information in city management, or the random bugs that had me reloading saves, but overall, it’s a solid start.
The Tidefall mechanic was my favorite new addition to the 4X genre, offering the same exploration and adventuring feeling of the early game in mid-and late-game scenarios by slowly receding the oceans and expanding the land. It doesn’t completely remove the fatigue I get with every 4X game save that goes too long, but it certainly helped me play longer games.
Amplitude says Endless Legend 2 will spend at least six months in early access, adding things like a new faction, more endgame content, and multiplayer. There is always a small gamble when jumping into early access games and hoping the studio delivers on its promises. But the currently available content has done a fantastic job of pulling me in, so it’s an easy recommendation from me.
The Early Access version of Endless Legend 2 launches on September 22, 2025, on PC via Steam and Microsoft Store with a $39.99 price tag. It will also be available on PC Game Pass on the same day.
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