I Am Legend

From the guys who brought you Endless Space, Endless Legend is a fantasy style, Civ-like 4x game set in the Endless Space universe, but on one particular planet. Given the fantasy setting, we assume it’s fairly early in the universes’ life cycle, but given the studio’s penchant for involving background lore and material, anything is possible. The basic story is that the planet the game is set on is dying, and it’s up to you and your chosen faction to deal with it, essentially.

The team still don't have everything figured out with regards to the combat in Endless Legend, but they're working on it.

There are 8 factions that you can choose from, and each faction has their own approach and own ending to the story driven campaign. The game uses a hex-grid system, and the game maps are split into regions. Only one city is allowed per region, although the placement of said city is up to you. Using resources you’ll recognise from Endless Space – food, production, dust & research, you can build and improve your city, and then your domain as you build new cities. Your ‘city-centre’ starts on the one tile, and then expands out as your city grows and you build more buildings. You can also build things like watchtowers on tiles away from your city centre, so you can use the whole region as far as city management goes.

Unlike Endless Space, Endless Legend actually has a fully formed combat engine. The game world is three dimensional in the sense that there is ‘height’ to the world. A hex’s tactical value is determined by its height, so you can have small hills, long cliffs etc… and this is important when it comes to combat. You can design your units how like, much like ship buildings in Space, and you can create armies and send them out into the world. For exploration purposes, Armies are merged into a single stack represented by the general or leader. As soon as they encounter an opposing army however, the units ‘spawn’ from that leader and spread out onto the adjacent tiles. Battles then happen in real time, on the map without having to load into a separate battle arena or anything like that.



It’s a nice touch, and those of you who weren’t a fan of the more stylised combat in Endless Space should have your needs fulfilled. It depends how in-depth the tactics are though in this mode, as if Amplitude doesn’t deliver here, then they might as well have stuck with the stylised, hands-off approach. Still, because the battles are in real-time, it does allow for a potential third (or more) party to enter into the fray and alter the balance of power. From what we were told, you will be able to see battles taking place off in the distance and you can move an army up to enter the fray. AI enemies/ other players can also do the same, but we’re not sure of the technical limits of this yet.
 

Empire/City management looks fairly involved, the UI has been designed to be deliberately familiar.

As well as the other factions, you’ll also encounter minor factions and independent peoples which you can assimilate in a number of ways. Assimilation allows you to add another major ‘trait’ to your own civilization, and in general your faction will change and evolve over time due things like progressions, events and so on. There’s a trade system which involves a marketplace where you can sell resources and goods. Also worth noting is that this game is going to be integrated with Amplitudes home-grown Games2Gether platform, where the community can get directly involved in how the game is made by spending 'tokens' to vote on what they'd like to see done. Endless Space was designed this way, but the studio has stepped things up a notch as there is a button in the main menue for the platform now.

We loved Endless Space, and whilst it’s a shame the team are departing from the science-fiction genre for the moment, we’re sure we’re going to love Endless Legend as well. There aren’t enough decent competitors to the Civilization throne at the moment, but the strategy genre in general seems to be going through a creative boom right now. We can’t wait to get our hands on this game and test it out properly. Endless Legend is due to release on PC & Mac in April 2014.

Most Anticipated Feature: Seeing how combat works in practice.