Endless Legend

Description

Endless Legend is a 4x game, in a similar mould to all those other 4x games you know and love (I’m looking at you Civilization V. I’m not looking at you Civilization: Beyond Earth.). Like any other 4x game, the 4x’s you are doing are: eXploring, eXpanding, eXploiting and eXterminating. The game follows on from developer Amplitude Studios’s other successful 4x game, Endless Space.

You start by picking your faction (there are eight to choose from including ones built on magic, knowledge and trading) and from there use your settler to found your first city.

A major difference from Civilization, and other similar games, is that the randomly generated map is split up into various regions and when you found a city in a region you take control of that entire region. However, each region can only support one city. The region provides your city with the resources necessary for growth, to produce units and buildings and to influence their entire empire.

Again, like Civ V, there are different conditions for victory. However, in Endless Legend there are a massive eight ways to claim victory, giving the player a massively varied ways to win and enabling a huge array of tactics that can be employed to conquer all your foes. There are the normal combat victory variants: eliminating all other factions or capturing all other capitals.

You can win by accruing large amounts of Dust (the games currency) or lots of Diplomatic Points. Or you can go down the science route and discover all the technologies. A couple of the more innovative conditions are the Exploration Victory – where you have to lay claim to 80% of the map (by placing a city in lots of different regions, remember) – and the Wonder Victory – where you complete all of the increasingly different quests that your chosen faction sets you.

The final way to win is by getting the highest score, with different aspects of your empire earning you points if you need to stop playing before someone meets one of the other seven conditions.

The gameplay and story lines set Endless Legend above many other 4x games and make it well worth a try. If you enjoy Civilization V but would rathe rit was set in a fantasy world with an engrossing plot then this is the game for you, so go out, gather some friends and have fun destroying each other (or sitting passively in a corner attempting a less aggressive victory condition).