Endless Legend made my 2014 PC Games of the Year list, and would have scored higher than honorable mention if I didn’t suck at the game so much. It is much better than Civilization, but harder.

They recently released a new DLC, Shifters, which adds a new Major faction, Allayi, which make use of a new resource, Pearls which can have an influence on future winters if you build an Altar of Auriga and use it to pray, using more Pearls to cast an influence on the next winter. Some buildings and equipment also use Pearls to build.

The Allayi are a nice addition to the races. They have no winter movement penalty, and they have really nice movement as it stands. On the negative side they need lots of food to grow and it’s hard to expand with them. Indeed I wasn’t aware of the expansion penalty while doing my initial play through. The Allayi see Pearls even without vision, so they are highly tied to Pearls. Their scouts can loot ruins easy enough too. I’m not sure how good they’d be at multiplayer though… I didn’t even attempt it (I’m too bad at the game to try multiplayer period). I’d be curious what other people found as the multiplayer experience with the new race.

I have a long play though here of my first 100 turns with the game. Note this is the first time I’ve played the game since around Early Access, so I’m beyond rusty and suck at the game even more than usual… This video is a highlight from my Twitch stream and wasn’t recorded local, so the video quality is as high as my direct recordings.

The TLDW/TLDR is that this is a very big and important update to Endless Legend. If you have the game, it may not be “Must Have” so much as “Strongly Suggested” to “Strongly Suggested when it goes on sale” expansion. I’m not sold on the price of $13 and might suggest waiting for a Steam Sale that pushes it closer to the $6-10 range. The new faction really adds a lot to it, and I think once one gets a hang of playing them, it becomes a must have expansion. I’m personally not there yet with the new race, but I can see how they’d become a favorite… at least for single player play.

My personal suggestion for now is to check out some streams and videos of better players. See if you like the new faction and mechanic. Then decide for yourself. I’m fairly happy with it. I continue to favor Endless Legend just slightly over Endless Space myself, but my son prefers Endless Space. I haven’t asked him if he prefers Endless Legend over Civilization as I do or not… We both love Dungeon of the Endless. All of which gets off topic. Be sure to watch people who are much better than I play it and get a feel for the new race and the new Pearls resource/mechanic (which sadly I don’t get into during the above video) and see if it’s a good fit for you right now.

NOTE: I was provided the DLC as a review copy via a press contact outside Amplitude, so my thanks to them.

EDIT: This QUICK review may be re-written later. I have a really bad headache as I write this and I’m finding it hard to concentrate. The general review of it being between Must Have and Strong Suggested will stand, but hopefully I can clean it up and expand on it. Why didn’t I wait? Well, I wanted to get it out while the DLC was still fresh, I had the day off and thought I could get it done.