2/5 ★ – CartridgeDust's review of Endless Legend.

Listen, I binged this. And that means that mechanically, something is working. The hooks work. Things about this game work very well. But was this more than a diversion, a brief brain snack with some unique but ultimately shallow trappings? Sadly, no. The fundamental problem for me is that MoO, my big 4X point of reference, really encouraged storytelling in an organic way. Factions declared war or peace against each other and it made the nightly news; every interaction, every lean story beat, was grounded in gameplay. But in Endless Legend, the story feels very tacked on. You grind through gameplay and then you're treated to little short story chunks which barely sync up with the game you've been playing. It doesn't help that the story and setting failed to wow me on their own merits. For every bit of creative flair, there are a half dozen lampshaded tropes. ("These aren't just generic elves. They have Twi'lek tendrils!") The music, while vaguely catchy, is rigidly paint-by-numbers for the fantasy genre. And ultimately, the bland global crisis at the story's core fails to spark the desired intrigue. Now, again... I binged. I found the game hard to stop playing, the first two go-arounds. And that requires a level of design savvy and mechanical expertise that could, for some folks, be sufficient to call the game a masterwork. But I'm here for stories, specifically stories that are told through (not in spite of) a game's mechanics. And failing that, I'm here for personality, weirdness, ambition. Endless Legend didn't really deliver on any of those fronts, at least not for me.