Endless Space 2 - 5/20 hours

I've played a lot of 4X games, and Endless Space 2 may have the best presentation and storytelling of any game since Alpha Centauri. It's nothing major, but there are a few incidental touches which help bring the world to life. Like, whenever you settle a planet, there's a short movie, only a few seconds long, that shows the planet's terrain and some of its native fauna (sadly not procedurally generated, though drawn beautifully enough that the lack of diversity is not a huge problem). Or the distinctive hero and quest portraits. Or the way that the game flips through a slideshow of the system's planets the first time you zoom in on it. It's inefficient, but it makes exploration and discovery feel more real.

The best part, though, is the faction design (or, at least, the best part I can see after having played the game for such a short time). Endless Space 2 has mildly asymmetrical factions that nonetheless feel very different in play. And each one is accompanied by a well-produced introductory video that really does a fantastic job of selling the faction's overall feel. My favorite was the one for the United Empire, which resembled nothing so much as an in-universe propaganda video.

I've not yet got a handle on the game as a whole, though. Endless Space 2 has a host of fiddly mechanics - a senate with various factions that can pass laws to benefit your empire, a marketplace where you can trade resources or hire heroes, a complex exploration system with dozens of different anomalies to discover, a quest system with powerful rewards for completion, and a luxury resource system that allows you to upgrade your planets with strong permanent bonuses that you have to customize and build. And that's without getting into the unique mechanics associated with each individual faction. It's hard to see how it all fits together, though I guess that's something that will get better in time.

This is a problem I like to have, though. I'm always saying to myself, "I wish this game had more moving parts," especially if it's a turn-based strategy. Normally, it's because I'm completely missing the point, though I have a feeling that in this regard, me and Endless Space 2 are on the same page.