Endless Space (PC) Review

To call Endless Space a Master of Orion clone would be an understatement. From the first screen, it imitates the functionality and design of MOO exactly. At game start, the player is presented with a motley crew of alien archetypes, the scientific researchers, the robotic builders, the alien warriors, and humans. Players can even create their own race in exactly the way MOO did, balancing positive and negative traits, choosing a portrait and home world features, and so on.

This step-for-step imitation doesn't stop at the empire selection screen, though. It carries on into the game proper. Starting off with one planet, one exploring unit, and one colony unit, players are limited in exploration by their empire's engine range; usually about four planets away from the home world. A tech is chosen from one of the four trees (diplomacy and trading, warfare, exploration and expansion, applied sciences), tax rates are adjusted, the home world build queue is adjusted, and starships set off to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate, complete with pulsing neon-coloured destination lines.

Endless Space is very nearly a MOO remake, just without the license. It's no cheap knockoff, though. It is made with skill, by developers who seem to know very well what makes a good turn-based strategy game.

There have been many recent knockoffs of those early 4X pioneers. None have been made with such skill as this. It shines through in the interface; so integral to a satisfying strategy gaming session. It shows in the quality hand drawn artwork, in character portraits and random events. It shows in how smoothly the game plays and transitions between states, such as flipping quickly between the galactic map to a city screen and back again, which makes managing a sprawling galactic empire a treat rather than a chore.

Everything about the game plays well and looks good. Which brings us to today, a year after the game's first release, and the reason for another write-up at this late day. Endless Space has expanded with its first paid DLC: Disharmony.

The expansion has brought to the table some nice improvements to the user interface. Ship building has a cleaner look to it. The tech trees have similarly been cleaned up. Combat has undergone major changes with the addition of carrier-based fighters and bombers. There are new invasion mechanics, as well. And of course there are new techs and events and more.

Despite these new additions, Disharmony received its fair share of criticism for being buggy, broken and bad, and, honestly, it deserved that criticism on release. However, the developer, Amplitude Studios, has remained dedicated to its work and has released multiple patches to address the problems, both technical- and design-wise. And now, cleaned up a bit and dusted off after some scuffles in the playground, Endless Space stands as a very fine example of its genre.

Is it perfect? No. There are still imbalanced empires, skills and techs. There are still small bugs. However, every strategy game known to man has such problems. Civilization, the biggest name in the genre, has numerous. When all is said and done, the fact is that Endless Space is fun and it plays well, and that's all that really matters.

It's a shame that Endless Space hasn't received more attention. Civilization V received ungodly amounts of praise for reviving turn-based strategy, even though it was even buggier and more poorly balanced on release than Endless Space was, without outright brainless enemy AI and very dodgy multiplayer. The recent X-Com remake was also problematic, extremely buggy on release, and, in many ways, a thin imitation of the original X-Com,; simplified and more digestible, but blander and less interesting for it.