Auriga, legendary world of the Endless.  It welcomes you with enchanted forests, challenges you with brutal winters, and captivates you with its past.  Ruins of some long-vanished magical civilization dot its surface, and strange energy flows through the land.  And in the time-honored tradition of the series, it creates far more questions about its universe than it answers.

Endless Legend is the latest installment in Amplitude Studios' Endless franchise.  This time, we return to Auriga, a lush fantasy world peppered with remnants of some impossibly advanced race.  For those weary of sword-and-sorcery tropes like elves, dwarves, and bearded wizards, Endless Legend will be a welcome breath of cool air.  You'll find that Endless Legends embraces fantasy and, at the same time, reinvents it in really subtle ways.  One way it does this is with its factions.  One group, the Broken Lords, are chivalric knights and aristocrats, trapped in incorporeal form and encased in armor.  Another faction, the Ardent Mages, are a race of tormented, furious sorcerers that have survived on Dust Magic, pain, and rage.

The faction you choose is only the beginning of your gameplay experience.  Once you get into the game and build your first city, it won't be long until you encounter one of the game's many minor factions.  (If you're arachnophobic, the worst thing that can happen to you is starting out surrounded by the Ceratan, a race of half-spider drider people.  They walk around making disgusting noises, filling you with loathing and forcing you to restart your game.  Which is exactly what happened to me.)  After my restart, I found myself on a lush, green plateau, surrounded by Enchanted Forests (that's actually what they're called).  My neighbors were the Gauran, a race of minotaurs far more interested in cozy homes and warm fires than in conquest.  As it turned out, that was good, because I needed to subdue them to advance.

I chose the Vaulters, a matriarchal human society known for surviving in vast underground ruins and for being pretty handy tinkerers.  One way in which Endless Legend begins to differ from a lot of other 4x titles is that it throws quests at you.  I use the word "quest" because it progresses you along a kind of storyline.  My quest asked me to conquer, subdue, and assimilate a minor faction in my territory.  I duly built a unit or two of crossbow-wielding marines, and went out to crush these peace-loving minotaurs and cram civilization down their throats.  They deserved it.  Once subdued, you merely have to visit your empire screen, and if you have enough empire points saved up, you can assimilate them.

Fans of hands-off macromanagement will probably enjoy warfare in Endless Legend.  You might remember how in games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri, the details of combat are entirely out of your hands.  You just build whole units at a time, fling them at entire enemy armies, and pray.   Endless Legend takes that spirit and changes it slightly.  You don't get the indifferent, godlike overview of Civilization here, where you watch entire armies live or die by the roll of the dice.  Endless Legend gives you a more operational view of war.  At the beginning of combat, you decide simply whether your units are to take an offensive stance, a defensive one, or to hold their positions and fight to the death (you can still order units to target specific other units, if you wish).  This gives you a chance to take advantage of terrain and balance it against the strengths and weaknesses of given units.  You have ranged units, like the Vaulter marines?  Put 'em on a hill and tell them to fire at the enemy.  Heavy melee units like those Gauran minotaurs?  Put them in the front to protect weaker units.  Since it all works on a kind of hex-based system, assigning a strong unit to hold a critical pass or valley is no problem.  With the right application of strategy, entire territories will lay open to your conquest, and you can begin to expand outwards to surrounding regions.  The only problem is that for some, battles may feel a little weak and watery.  Combat doesn't give the kind of dramatic impact one might find in stronger wargames, and it's difficult to imagine a deep personal and emotional investment in the kind of battles Endless Legend offers.

Prepare to be civilized.  Resistance is futile.

Back in your city, if you've completed the first quest, you'll progress to the next phase.  My quest asks me to build extractors on two strategic resources.  Commodities like wine and spices need to have special buildings placed on them, but once done, these resources flow into your empire.  But that's not the only way you advance, either.  Every so many turns, the computer will ask you to spend your hard-saved Empire Points in choosing a new direction for your empire in the management screen.  This allows you access to extra benefits.  If you're military-oriented, you can drag the slider up and give yourself a 50% bonus to production of new units.  If you're thinking of winning by outsmarting the other guy or gal, drag your slider to the right for bonuses in research.

But wait.  Just when your armies are happily moving outward toward that neighboring kingdom, with every intention of sticking your bloody banner in its soil...

Winter arrives.

The arrival of winter adds a whole new facet to the gameplay of Endless Legend.  Production slows -  especially food production - and city growth drops.  Armies move more slowly.  Your income grinds to a screeching halt, and if you don't have enough Dust in your coffers, paying your troops becomes a real problem.  We're shown that winter on Auriga is somewhat different than on Earth.  Summer turns the world into a lush, green paradise, and it lasts for years on end.  But winter lasts for years, too, and it can ruin civilizations that aren't dug in and well-prepared.

Sean Bean never told me it would be like this.

And of course, winter isn't the only harsh difficulty you come up against in your dreams of empire.  The most notable obstacle you face is the difficulty of the game itself, now adjustable, praise the developers.  As you're starting a map, you not only have the option of adjusting the game's difficulty, but also the game's speed, and this is critical to the flow of the game, since the game's speed is itself a difficulty factor.  You can put the game on easy mode, but if you don't set the speed to 'fast', the game can drag on interminably.  You can spend tens of turns getting yourself into a position where you can even start building military units for expansion, and in that time, winter and lack of expansion can wreck your economy.  It is every bit as painful as it sounds.  But the right kind of patient, determined conqueror (not me) can probably put the game on a slower speed and enjoy a long...long...long play session.  I personally found that the game, set on any speed slower than "fast", dragged out interminably.  Constructing city improvements felt like a...well..."Endless" chore.  Upon building one's first improvement, twenty turns might go by before you get the chance to finally start constructing military units.  You could end up having to make the harsh choice between expansion and being able to pay for and feed those units.  It's the whole point of a strategy game, obviously, but Endless Legend can make those choices painful on slower game speeds, and your own real-life time becomes the currency you spend to build strong nations.  Sticking to faster game speeds makes empire-building less of a hassle.

The graphics and sound are probably my favorite aspects.  Art and music weave themselves together to create a relaxing, tear-jerkingly beautiful experience.  The music somehow manages to sound like something out of a fairy tale, but still a little strange and otherworldly.  And wherever you go, your eyes are pleased.  The UI is another marvel to behold.  Clean, minimalistic, and beautiful, it manages to look good by making the game look better.  Text is easy to read, screens are easy to find.  Regardless of difficulties you may or may not have with the challenge level, nothing can be blamed on bad design or a clumsy interface.  It's crisp and elegant.

Fantasy fans looking for a something new in a fresh, inspired world will find their prize in Endless Legend.  It will also appeal to sci-fi fans as well, since the Endless universe is, at its core, an incredibly rich work of science fiction.  The real winners here are 4x strategy fans, since the game brings something new and bold to the table without ever cloning other games.

Endless Legend is an all-around fresh take, and promises to remain timeless by doing one simple thing - coming onto the scene with its own distinct, unique identity.  And it will leave a permanent mark on the 4x strategy genre.