Endless Legends and Subnautica: Below Zero

Thanks to deep discounts for a few days and a lack of other entertainments on my plate, I picked up Endless Legend a couple weeks back. It's a reasonably-solid fantasy 4X strategy game. It definitely manages the (cliche, but true) one-more-turn feel to things.

On the up side, I like the variety of races. Some of them feel pretty standard, but some really shake up fundamental gameplay elements like eschewing the food resource for buying population and unit healing or only being able to settle one city or "infesting" locations beyond normal borders. I also like the quest system. Most of the actual quests boil down to completing a certain research or going to a location with a specific unit(s) in your army, but they help add some flavor and each race has a different (if slightly in some cases) quest chain that eventually leads to a possible victory condition.

On the down side, the quests sometimes seem prone to breakage. I think I messed one up by killing a roaming army on the map that would have been a reward for quest completion, and I've hit a few other quests that didn't seem able to be completed for some reason. There also isn't a great deal of variety and after about a playthrough and a half, I feel like I've seen all (or very close to all) the main variations of short quests. Also, like many such strategy games, it's very difficult to find an appropriate level of challenge. Changing the AI one level might make a playthrough go from cakewalk to always being outclassed.

But it's entertaining enough for what it is and I'll get plenty of play out of it.

And then Subnautica: Below Zero released and I had to snap that up and play. The first game managed to balance sandbox exploration and building with enough of a story to motivate forward momentum so finely it's one of my favorite and most appreciated games in years. The sequel isn't that good, but I still definitely enjoyed it.

The building is mostly the same. The Seamoth and Cyclops subs are replaced by the Seatruck - which starts with a fairly agile little cab and can have modules added on to serve as a mobile base. Some people complained about that, but I'm fine with it. There's also the addition of the Snowfox, a hoverbike, for use in the larger surface areas in this game. That... I wish I'd never built, as it somehow managed to 1) be basically unnecessary and 2) induce a degree of motion sickness in me.

The exploration still felt good, but I think the first game felt a bit more open and interconnected. I still had moments of finding something unexpected by traveling a little farther in some direction and the couple maps (found as log-type things you can reference, not an actual map that tracks you) were useful.

The story is alright. Because of the other elements of the game, I think, it has some notable pacing issues. Subnautica managed to, but luck or design, herd me in a more story-appropriately linear fashion. Below Zero saw me solving what happened to the protagonist's sister (the motivation for going to the planet) prior to tracking down someone who had some information about it. And the other plotline of working with an alien intelligence felt like I bounced around a little in it too. But it was an okay experience even if it didn't really build up suspense and climax in a real meaningful way or have any huge-impact moments like the Sunbeam in the first game. The ending came on a vaguely hopeful tone of exploring new lands, which felt fine for the game, rather than really closing a story. It does make me want to see more, though, and that more might theoretically be very different as it moves to another world entirely.