My gf and I play this together often. We come up with story lines for our factions and how they pertain to each other. It's a lot of fun groveling at the feet of an tigress queen, or eating a dwarf man who just didn't do it for me. A little buggy in online mode but a really fun game nonetheless.

I really want to love this game, but it's just not right for me and given that I have to point the thumb up or down, down it is. For a 4X it has way too much HoMM in it - even the largest map size is too cozy, and you will be forward-settled before you even clear the area around your start. If you don't make the underground small or use a mod to reduce the number of entrances, you'll have enemies popping up n the middle of your land by what should be mid-game.

If you don't mind those things, there are some things done well. The abilities to customize your faction are pretty broad (and unlike GalCiv4, there's no hardcoded bad assumptions that break game mechanics if you mix and match characteristics. The tactical combat is reasonably fun, and the auto-resolve seems to simulate rather than just roling the dice once.

This game is ultimately pretty tedious which is a shame because I wanted to like it and gave it a fair shot through its campaign missions and some free play.

A lot of 4X games have an issue where difficulty scaling against AI means that the early game is very hard due to the unfair advantages they have to give high level AI on harder difficulties but you ultimately end up steamrolling if you hold on to the lategame. This game has that problem amplified much more than any other 4X game I've played and that's probably because this game is singularly focused on combat which is where that problem tends to be the worst in 4X games.

On easy difficulties you will steamroll things and just be passing turns with auto combat with no real satisfaction. On higher difficulties you will be bombarded with tier 5 neutral and enemy units while you're still rocking tier 1 and 2 so you have to play a really slow defensive no combat strategy for half the game in a game focused on combat. The AI will make deathballs of units lategame that wont be difficult for you to deal with, but will be tedious because of the siege times, triply so if it's a large map with lots of players because I've had games where 5+ AI players means the lategame turns take upwards of 3-5 minutes per turn, while your turns will be spend passing turns as you wait for a siege timer to go down. Seconds of gameplay for every 15 minutes of waiting effectively. I was finding myself tabbed out watching videos or playing other games while waiting for this game to play itself slowly.

Race variety is mostly just superficial, I know I'm spoiled by Amplitude 4X games like Endless Legend or Endless Space where different factions feel like they are playing different games because they have entirely unique units and abilities but it's kind of a shame that my gameplan no matter what I'm playing in this is pretty much the same: make a pretty identical army and steamroll everything because every victory involves combat. I build my cities the same way no matter what, I build my armies the same way, I research spells with a very similar priority no matter what. Whether I'm playing marauding chaotic orcs, "peaceful" research cats, or isolationist goatfolk my gameplan is 100% the same every single time unless there's a story objective telling me to do something slightly different.

Lastly the performance is embarrassing. I know I don't have the most bleeding edge machine but I more than surpass all of the games recommended specs, CPU, GPU, and memory wise and yet I get really bad audio popping, which searching around the devs seem aware of from players reporting but cannot reproduce. I mostly get sub 60FPS especially in battle scenes with a lot of foliage, and as mentioned before the AI turn timers are horrendously long even with all animations turned off to speed things up significantly. With the game being a year old now I am assuming its not really going to get any more optimisation patches, though credit where it's due I heard it was much worse at launch.

In conclusion I just sorta wish they went the Amplitude 4X route of depth of content over breadth. 40+ playable factions is a lot less impressive when a game with 13 like Endless Legend has far more replayability and variety.