At the first game / casual level, Endless Legend 2 is pretty and fun. You build up your cities, raise armies led by heroes, fight various threats, gain hero levels and gear, and grow your economy. It is at the point where you start thinking "So how does this work exactly?" and start experimenting that things go south. While I am not a game developer, I do think that programmers of such strategy games first program how the game works, and then get somebody to document it, and make the information available to the player. In Endless Legend 2 they seem to have reversed that process: There are a lot of in-game texts that say "this game mechanic works this way", and then in reality it doesn't. That starts from basic things like the consumable hero item mechanic, where the items clearly state that their one-time use doesn't use the heroes movement and action for the turn; in reality the use of the item uses the whole turn. Endless Legend 2 also has natural wonders, which are very pretty and have cut scenes, but the promised bonuses when controlling the territory the natural wonder is in simply don't work at all. In addition to the gap between documentation and actual game, there are a few more serious bugs. My second game of Endless Legend 2 I could never finish: I did the chapter 3 of the faction quest, and then chapter 4 of the quest always bugged out: The quest cancelled itself, but left the notification button you usually need to press to get the quest window. The button didn't do anything, as the quest had cancelled itself; but as long as that button was there, there was absolutely no way to get to the End Turn button, and so the game simply got permanently stuck.

And all this is just the chapter where the game clearly isn't working as intended. Other parts of the game do work, but are far from being balanced. As in many other 4X games, there are different victory conditions, and you only need to fulfill one of them to win. But as the 5 factions are asymmetrical, and some of them are exceptionally strong in some areas that correspond to victory conditions, I often had the feeling that I was barely in mid-game when I already got the message that I had won. Which is just as well, as some other parts of the second half of the game, like doomwraiths, are also unbalanced, but against the player.

I am playing Early Legend 2 on Game Pass, which is to say at no extra cost to me. At that cost, the game is fine to play for some hours, see the systems, and then uninstall it. But I would have been really upset if I had bought the game in this state on Steam for $50. The developer Amplitude has a good reputation to improve their games over time, and this might become a great game in a year or so. But right now I wouldn't really recommend Endless Legend 2 at the current price in the current state. Wait for a sale and a few major patches. Or play it on Game Pass.