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Endless Legend 2 review
Endless Legend 2 is a magnificent example of why Amplitude is so loved by 4X fans.
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What is it? Rule-breaking sci-fantasy 4XRelease date: September 17, 2026 (1.0 version)Expect to pay: $50/£45Developer: Amplitude StudiosPublisher: Hooded HorseReviewed on: Radeon RX 6800 XT, Ryzen 9 5900, 32GB RAMSteam Deck: VerifiedLink: Official site
There has been no drought of good 4X games over the past decade. Part of that has been the steady work of Amplitude, whose Endless series has become a stalwart part of the strategy scene. Endless Legend 2 further cements Amplitude's legacy as a great 4X developer, delivering the studio's trademark creativity and standout visual design in a modernized package.
The original Endless Legend was a shot in the arm for a 4X genre that had gotten pretty stale. If you'd asked me in the years afterward if I wanted more Endless Legend, I'd have said yes. In the years since, many of its innovations—and those from sibling series Endless Space—have become standards in the genre. You might expect that to have dulled some of the charm. 12 years later, though, I still want more Endless Legend.
I wanted more Endless Legend because there's never enough good science fantasy. Not the Star Wars kind, though that's fun too, but the kind where it's sword and sorcery with a technological flavor. Where it's mostly monsters and wizards. Bows, not blasters.
So I'm glad that we're back to Endless Legend's worlds of crashed starship survivors building robotic golems and battling with titanium swords and wielding magic that might just be nanotechnology. The setting and its weird people are just as good as the first time, though a bit more scientific-feeling. No dragons, for example, or elf stand-ins—instead we've got evolved desert lizards, coral robots, and sand spirit genies. It's another rich world that lets its developers break the rules of the genre in interesting and creative ways.
The shoreline recedes, unveiling sunken landscapes and ancient technologies that are now ripe for your faction to colonize and exploit.
The new world of Saiadha is familiar in one important way: Like Auriga of Endless Legend, Saiadha is dying. This time though it's because the Endless, an ancient race, sealed something away beneath Saiadha when they terraformed it from a planet of desert dunes into one of storm-wracked seas and isolated islands. Now that something is coming back, which means the oceans are draining away into the planet's core.
Every few dozen turns a monsoon comes, shrouding the world in storms, and at the end of that monsoon season comes Tidefall: The shoreline recedes, unveiling sunken landscapes and ancient technologies that are now ripe for your faction to colonize and exploit—a perfect setup for a genre about expanding and building.