I cannot recommend the game in its current state and it feels pretty bad to have to leave a negative review. The short version is this game is still in early access despite being a 1.0 launch. The launch state is absolutely unacceptable and it's a tale as old as early access games. For the rest of this review I'm gonna focus on one particularly issue that I am very passionate about.

Endless Legend 1 had the Broken Lords. They were a unique and fan favorite faction that used the FIDS system in very interesting ways. Instead of using food, you can purchase pops with dust (the equivalent of gold in other 4x games like civ) which leads to a radically different playstyle of going all in on dust. The problem was they were a big buggy and also under tuned. They were capable of being very strong when they got the ball rolling but in most games they were mediocre.

Enter Endless Legend 2 which brings back Broken Lords in a few form as the Last Lords with much better theming and more faction features focusing on not only dust focus but population management. Unfortunately, all of their new features are bugged or not feature complete and they are the weakest faction in the game by a mile. They have been in this state since they were added to Early Access and nothing has been done to fix this. The following is a list of issues I have encountered personally or are well known issues about the faction amongst the community. Every bug listed has already been reported to Amplitude in early access.

(Bug) Their unique building, the Lord's Estate, can't be built on a village if it's been leveled up to level 2. This can also lock your production queue if the building is currently being built and the game won't warn you about it. (I lost a dozen turns of production on my capital when I discovered this)

(Bug) The cost of buying population can just break, leading to wildly wrong prices for some cities. This is a beneficial bug but replicating it reliably is impossible.

(Bug) If a village rebels and it is next to a soul repository, you will lose your primordial last lord pops forever. There is no way to fix this.

(Bug) Most of the tooltips explaining the faction don't work or give wrong information. Primordial Last Lords only work off of pops in the job category and the tooltip for Lord's Estate is just wrong. The game never tells you what Rebellion on a village actually does.

(Design oversight) Healing your units with dust only works in your territory and is extremely overcosted when you take into account how bad this faction is at producing dust.

(Design oversight) Every Last Drop doesn't work as well as it did in the first game despite the effect being identical. This is because of how tiles work. There are now a lot more tiles that give only food yields and a lot less tiles give dust. This results in at least a third if the tiles in the game being barren. The average dust producing tile only gives 1 dust, meaning even an above average settle location is just a cluster of 2 dust tiles.

(Feature incomplete) Sacrifice for the Realm lets you convert foreign pops into last lords at a 2 to 1 ration very slowly netting a dust boon and a massive hit to approval. No one knows how to use this ability. Seriously, I have scoured the internet for guides on this faction and the best guides I have found will basically just say "don't push the button". Doing it early isn't worth it because you don't have enough pops to convert. Doing it too late will destroy your economy by taking you straight to rebellion.

(Design oversight) When Last Lords came out in Early Access they had all the other issues listed but at least they had very strong armies so you could be good at war even if your economy was bad. They did a balance patch that gutted the Last Lord's military units. So your economy is bad and your military is bad. You just can't compete militarily with other factions even at tech and unit count parity.

(Design oversight) Their faction quest is really bad. Narratively, super cool and I love it. In actually play and balance it's terrible. Most faction quests in this game are pretty easy and give alright rewards since they took away Quest Victory. Very quickly you are going to get a choice. Option A is clearly a quest Fortress which is horrendously overtuned and 2 to 3 times as strong as the quest fortresses in other faction quests. You will have to either wait until end game techs to deal with it or take the other option. The other option is sacrifice 10 pops and as already stated, this is basically suiciding your already bad economy because that mechanic isn't worth using.

(Design oversight) The one good thing Last Lords have going for them is their Heroes are overpowered. Problem: Anyone can recruit Last Lord heroes as mercs and Last Lord Heros are better in the hands of other factions as a result. Last Lord heros can basically solo other armies entirely if you level them right and stack up their infinitely scaling HP. This absolutely needs to be nerfed but once they do it this faction will have absolutely nothing going for them.

This is all incredibly unfortunate because the fantasy, theming, and presentation of Last Lords in this game is 10/10. They really lean into the noble death knight vampire except it's actually tech we don't understand thing and it is great. Unfortunately actually playing them is insufferable unless you knock down the difficulty level by 2 or even 3 than what you can on every other faction and even then you will run into some terrible bugs along the way. Considering the state Broken Lords are still in to this day in Endless Legend 1 this will probably never be fixed except by modders and even they can't fix a lot of these bugs.

Probably the worst balancing and stupidest AI I've seen in a long time. You have to be aspecially talented to make sequel worse than previous game.

It's engaging at first but gets boring rather quickly. It takes way too long to develop and you can't adapt factions to different playstyles. Each faction seems to be stuck in its own lane. If you want to be aggressive there's only a couple factions you can play. The rest take forever to do anything fun. I think its a cool idea but tough execution.