I should have written a post right after I finished the tutorial, but it only took me an hour to get through, so I thought it was premature. I decided that I was just going to dabble a little bit in order to get a smidge more material for my blog.
Six hours later, I emerge, blinking, into the light. I'm a third of the way done with the game, and I haven't even won a victory yet. It is, of course, the curse of the genre. So at least Endless Legend doesn't disappoint in that regard.
My main impression of the game, the sensation that sticks with me most after this "limited" exposure is that it is very busy visually. There's lots of terrain types, each with a minute variation on the resources it produces, and when you have the tile yields up, the screen just looks incredibly cluttered. Also, the build times and the research times do not quite synch up, so a lot of the time I do not have anything to build in my cities. And while that is not a complaint, per se, it does grate a bit against my usual play style.
Yet Endless Legend does some interesting things with the 4-X genre. The world map is carved up into regions, each of which can support one city. Cities can expand their borders, theoretically up to the edges of their region, by building special tile improvements, giving you control over the shape of the land you work, and adding a satisfying wrinkle to the logistics of your empire. There's a quest system that is perhaps the most well-integrated of any I've seen in a 4-X game - you can get quests from minor factions and goodie huts which will reward you with resources, special items, technology, or diplomatic benefits.
Basically, there are a lot of good ideas in this game, enough so that I don't worry too much about the long-ish wait between turns (this is probably due to my aging computer anyways) or the sometimes opaque mechanics (I didn't realize there was a population prerequisite to build the borough improvement that expands your borders). Yet it hasn't quite come together for me. It still feels like I'm engaging with parts of the game, but have not quite got a grip on the whole.
But then again, what do you expect. I've only been playing it for seven hours.
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