Endless Space Hands-on Preview!

Endless space: Not the greatest 4X in the world; just a preview

If you got that reference, good for you; that means you’re up on the genre. If not, don’t worry. There is still a lot you can glean out of this preview. Endless Space boils down to three distinct facts: It’s a space 4X strategy title (think Master of Orion, Sins of a Solar Empire), it allows 2-8 players to compete at a time and it’s in its beta stages. Beyond those things it’s a deep (sometimes too deep) strategy title where gamers will have to micromanage an entire empire…in space. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, read on!

So with that out of the way there are a couple things of note. The first being the incredibly high learning curve for this title. Even if you’ve already played other 4X titles, Endless Space will surely confuse you in the beginning. Though it feels simpler than Sins of a Solar Empire, my first four hours were rather upsetting. This is due mainly to the lack of information. As of now, when in tutorial mode, information will only pop up when a new event or menu is encountered. After that the only way you can enable that specific part of the tutorial is to replay it via a new game. So like the tutorial for battles, it only pops up on your first battle. There’s no help repository. Unfortunately, that’s horribly normal for the genre; usually about 30 minutes into a 4x game I jump on GameFaqs to find documentation by people who’ve reversed engineered the gameplay mechanics. That way I’ll actually know what all the things do and how they benefit me. Seeing a message that says “this gives you +7 to empire”…without knowing what empire is in respect to this game bothered me. To be fair, the curve isn’t an insurmountable mountain to climb and Empire does try to train you a little. It’s just something to be aware of when jumping into any 4X title.

Once you get past the starting hurdles, you’ll start to notice other points of interest. Like the graphics. Endless Space looks rather good for a 4X in battle, though like most in the genre, that’s not where you’ll spend your time. That said, the overworld map and sub-maps of your galaxy looks pretty good as well, even if it’s cryptic. There is a lot of information to digest per screen; this is not a bad note for the game, just a problem of the genre in general. With all the information required to run a galactic empire having a large excel sheet, while not compelling, would probably be easier to deal with considering the level of detail in these games.

Endless Space offers multiple planets to explore. With a number of different climates, planets will require gathering a large amount of research to colonize them. Which means you’ll need to rush that tech out quickly; in this case, more so than normal. Moving away from the planets for a bit, this game tech branches into four separate trees: warfare, science, exploration and expansion (movement), and diplomacy. Each branch, when researched to maximum, opens up the standard instant win condition (except warfare, since you’ll get to crush your enemies with it). The current tech tree visualization is sprawling and not as manageable as others. Take ship construction. It’s mostly a list of modules and an elaborate diagnostic showing the stats resulting from the various parts chosen. It’s simple and effective; a well-executed part of the game!

Ship motions on the other hand are on the clunky side and can sometimes seem unresponsive. This is made more difficult by the zooming feature in the overworld map which does not allow management on the highest scales. This leads to a lot of zooming out/in and constant dragging sessions to get anything around the map in the strategic sense.

Moving back to the planets, there are four primary resources: Food, Industry, Dust, and Science (lovingly acronym as FIDS in game). Dust is this game’s version of currency (spice) and is essentially compressed macguffinite (a plot device that advances the story but has little relevance to said story), leading it to fill in random and convenient roles in technology. The rest are named in “it does what it says on the tin” fashion. Other than that there are what feels like a thousand sub-types of resources, features, and other semi-important numbers that not all the planets care to have, which affects gameplay. The most important of all these is the Happiness/approval level. Happiness designates the amount of labor or production available; a hateful empire will do absolutely nothing to better itself. Happiness is not very well fleshed out and requires a lot of reading and drilling around through the game’s various menus/research trees to really isolate what makes a planet happy. In the end most planet management boils down to setting the AI to specialize at a specific resource leaving your planets on the whole balanced and happy.

Those are the main areas of note in Endless Space. Other factors include Hero units and diplomacy. Heroes are interesting modifying units, potentially game winning pieces. Though their execution keeps me feeling distanced from the avatars of your empire’s justice. Diplomacy is straight forward and simple. The interactions with the other races are boiled down to degrees of hatred or friendship with little flavor text thrown in. Again, it’s still in the beta stages.

There are some issues, mainly when it comes to giving players needed information. It’s simple enough to fix; by actually setting the starter games up with only two empires and the game mode on fast allows players to get their feet wet with the game’s UI and lingo. An option to keep tutorial pop ups coming would also help out a lot. Overall, I’d say keep an eye on this title because for all the problems that the genre (and consequently this game) has, when you’re in the 20th hour and fighting off enemies on all sides, winning control over the galaxy is amazingly satisfying!

Developed by Amplitude Studios, Endless Space is set to release on August 24th. Be sure to check back with us as we continue to cover this title!

Update: Endless Space releases on July 4th on PC and August 24th on Mac.