"Endless Legend 2 has one chance of enduring success, and that is to beat Civilization VII’s first expansion pack to market, not an easy feat for a title that is already well behind the struggling market leader"
ENDLESS Legend 2 releases at a critical time for the 4X genre, with the king of the genre, Civilization, barely holding onto the throne. Never before has there been a time when a newly launched 4X title had the opportunities that ENDLESS Legend 2 has, with Civilization VII potentially over a year away from becoming a “good” game, let alone a great one..
ENDLESS Legend 2 has a chance that has been afforded to few other games, the opportunity to dethrone Civilization from its place at the top of the 4X genre, a position that it has held comfortably for over 30 years.
While this is all very exciting, launching into Early Access comes with its own issues, one of which is content fatigue, with of day one Early Access players becoming burned out long before ENDLESS Legend 2 completes its Early Access journey.
While some (like myself) prefer to spend a few hours seeing if there is anything worth looking forward to before shelving it until version 1.0, others will play what is already here to death, and despite the current content being very high quality and some of the best the developers have ever put out, launching a title this early in development is always dangerous, especially when several features are only partially fleshed out and many factions are not yet playable.
While the quality of content available at Early Access launch is both substantial and very high, what is missing is equally sizable and very noticeable.
ENDLESS Legend 2 feels like half a game, which makes sense considering it has only just begun its Early Access journey, but with 4X fans tiring of promises and wanting something substantial, I cannot help but wonder how much better ENDLESS Legend 2 would have done if it launched as a feature complete title.
In my personal opinion it would not have outsold Civilization VII, but it would have certainly scored much higher and enjoyed slow but steady growth, while Civilization VII struggles to maintain 10,000 concurrent users while its predecessor comfortably enjoys numbers well over 30,000, with peaks into the low 50,000s.
Civilization VII is almost universally panned by players as being a worse game than Civilization VI, and despite struggling to maintain a quarter of the community enjoyed by its predecessor, its player base vastly dwarfs the ENDLESS Legend 2 community, with the latter struggling to reach 200 concurrent players for much of the day while Civilization VII hovers around 10k concurrent players for much of the day on Steam alone.
While ENDLESS Legend 2 is doing about as well as ENDLESS Legend for much of its life, must be bitterly disappointing considering that in January 2024, ENDLESS Legend peaked at an astonishing 89,190 concurrent users on Steam.
Of course, we do not know how many people are playing ENDLESS Legend 2 via Game Pass, and it is likely far more play via Game Pass than Steam, for a high profile title with 81 percent positive reviews to struggle this much on Steam is a problem, and one that could derail the developers’ future plans for the franchise.
While it is still early days for ENDLESS Legend 2, and ENDLESS Legend is at this time a more feature complete title, almost every core mechanic is present in some form at this stage of Early Access, and in almost every regard ENDLESS Legend 2 feels like a more user friendly and higher quality title than ENDLESS Legend, having more in common with Humankind than older titles made by the developers.
From visuals to city management, every aspect of the game feels both modern and accessible, and while some fans of ENDLESS Legend may feel it strays too far in some areas from the original in an effort to appeal to a wider demographic, such feedback must be ignored if the developers hope to see ENDLESS Legend 2 become a real contender in the 4X genre.
While there is something to be said about listening to feedback when a majority of players do not like how a certain aspect of a game works, when nearly 82 percent of players enjoy ENDLESS Legend 2 as it is, making changes to appeal to the remaining 18 percent is dangerous, especially when you risk losing the 82 percent in the process.
While I am all for following the example of Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Luke, where he spoke of the importance of leaving the 99 sheep in an effort to find the one that had gone astray, we are not talking about salvation and security in Jesus Christ here, we are talking about a 4X game, and when it comes to games, making radical changes to please a few detractors who will likely never be happy is not only a poor choice, but a potentially disastrous one for any developer who starts down that path.
In short, Jesus talking about the importance of a shepherd going after the one sheep which has gone astray is a great and wonderful thing.
However developers wasting time making changes to their game to cater to a handful of gamers who probably would not be happy no matter what you do is a waste of time, money and effort better spent on making the game better for the majority who enjoy the game the way the developers originally envisioned.
Endless Legend 2 is a 4x strategy game developed by Amplitude Studios and published by Hooded Horse, it released on 22 September 2025, and is available exclusively on PC.
Endless Legend 2 supports the following peripherals:
Endless Legend 2 is rated PEGI 12+ and contains no offensive content.
I like ENDLESS Legend 2 a lot, and it shows great promise for a title this early in its Early Access journey. However the next 12 months are critical for ENDLESS Legend 2 and its developers, as Civilization will not slumber forever, and whether it is a Civilization VII relaunch or major update, or an entirely new Civilization title, the king will return.
When it does, titles such as ENDLESS Legend 2 will need to be ready to offer players a reason to stay when a series they have known and loved for over three decades comes calling.
We found Endless Legend 2 to be a good game, meaning it is likely to be enjoyable for most players, despite having a few areas that could be improved upon.
Note: This title is in Early Access, meaning it is publicly available but still evolving. The rating shown reflects its current state and may change as development continues.
"It’s that time of year again - a new Call of Duty is almost upon us, and so we must look back at the more recent entries in the series to see which are worth playing, and which are better left in the past."
"Sid Meier's Civilization (1991) is one of the most important PC games in history and, in many ways, is responsible for the widespread popularity and mass adoption of the 4X genre by generations of gamers."
"Bloated, Laggy, occasionally problematic, and the last of an era, Empire: Total War is all these things. Yet despite all of this, it still is one of the unique titles in the history of the Total War Franchise."
