Enhanced Reality
Endless Space 2 is a complex and intricate system, held together by a dense web with paths widening and widening, at which point it is a bit difficult to find the connection between all the nodes. There is a tutorial, through multiple windows explaining basic mechanics, navy movements, colonizing other planets and rudiments of the game interface, but much is left to the player’s patience.
Just 4x’s UI is usually the rock, the wall in front of which many users stop, a bit because they might be squeezed in front of menus and long lists of voices and keys, a while because they were cold in front of of aseptic interfaces, cut with the team and ruler, without any personality.
Those ofEndless Space 2 they are a show for the eyes: in their extreme and cold rationality, they transmit to the perfection the feeling of being in charge of a dispersed empire in the deep space looking for a new home, while a second later on the screen appears a majestic artwork animated by a newly colonized planet. Amplitude Studios has endowed the countless menus and windows that make up Endless Space 2 almost a diegetic function, capable of accompanying the player by hand through the story of growth and the conquest of space by one of the eight races present in the game.
The quality of the IUs lies not only in its aesthetic appearance: Endless Space 2is a rich and profound title with many facets hidden in the many interfaces, yet everything that can be safely consulted and viewed through the mouse wheel, with a zoom capable of understanding the entire galaxy, or going down to the slightest detail of the planet, where to see the resources made available by the celestial body or the secrets hidden beneath its surface.
Every single particle of Endless Space 2 It is also flush with the simple push of the space bar when the player is catapulted into an amplified reality where the spherical forms of the planets and the gas nebulae leave room for innumerable indicators and statistics, in which to read every single characteristic of their faction , from the food that grows on colonized planets to open trade routes, through scientific research.
Total freedom
Words and terms such as personality, style and identity are rarely associated with a strategic 4x, but Endless Space 2 is a real exception in the landscape, it scares you to the beginning with a steep and ruthless curve of learning – especially by playing at the highest difficulty levels – but at the same time welcomes you and invites you to lose in your meanders, studying every single facet of the faction that is facing the space adventure.
Gaming experience radically changes based on the faction chosen at the beginning of the game: there are eight of them, each with its own past on the shoulders, each linked in some way with the Endless, a powerful primordial race, whose only memory in the galaxies is the Dust, the resource became over time the exchange currency.
In addition to the predefined ones, nothing prevents the player from spending literally hours in order to define a new breed ad hoc,What stands out in Endless Space 2 is the deep distance separating each breed and we are not talking about some stretch that is soon left in the background, but uniqueness that marks every single move in the depths.
For example, Sophon, a peaceful population dedicated to science, colonizes other planets by sending orbiting probes around space systems, as opposed to the Vodyans, who move along the galaxy aboard huge floating arcs, but never settle permanently on the planet, while the Unfallen, a kind of Space Barbarians, literally extend through the roots that by hand trap and colonize the celestial bodies.
Each faction differs for some of the starting technologies and also has its own missions system, a path that determines its growth and expansion, along with the cooperative quests related to the Academy and numerous events, which shine for the sense of “Risk & Rewards,” where all pros and cons of all choices must be carefully weighed.
As if that was not enough, the uniqueness of the races is also underlined by an ever-changing soundtrack, which with its melody wants to highlight the peculiar features of the faction, sweeter and slower for the more peaceful, much more solemn and cadenced example for the expansionist United Empire, the human faction.
