Mostly though - and even after 27 hours playing it, I still think it is a valid criticism - it is because, just like Endless Legend, Endless Space 2 kind of sucks at building the emergent story of your empire’s growth from a single planet to a galaxy-bestriding colossus. Partially this is because I made the mistake of buying it a week before it came out of Early Access, foolishly assuming (because I’d done the same thing with Battle Brothers and had a whale of a time) that it wouldn’t be too different from the finished article instead Amplitude released a 3 gigabyte patch on launch day that papered over a lot of the obvious Early Access holes and made it significantly more coherent as an end-to-end experience. I regarded the first game as something of a qualified success, but the fantasy followup Endless Legend left me completely cold despite having some ideas and mechanics that were, objectively, very good indeed – it’s the first time ever that I’ve bounced off a game without being able to really explain why, and to start with I was afraid that the same might be true of Endless Space’s sequel. It took me a while to warm up to Endless Space 2.
