Good evening you are listening to Thru lives ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakme.

Join me today.

We welcome back our friend, Loris Warren's T.J. Hafer. Hello, hello. And we've also got Kitaku's Luke Plunkin once again. Hello, everybody. So tonight we're going to be talking about Endless Space 2. The first time we've checked in on the game since our first show on it this past spring. Last month we put it to a vote of our Patreon backers to see which recent game it was time

for us to return to.

And Endless Space 2 narrowly won a pretty closely contested vote.

It was a real photo finish.

So, Luke, I think I wanted to start with you because you, I think, were very much on board with

endless space, too, when it originally came out.

I think your review for Kataku cited it as probably the best of the sort of current-gen

crop of 4-Xs or space 4-Xs.

And I'm curious, what really clicked with you about for this game and what were some of

your reservations that maybe amplitude is addressed or failed to address with updates in

subsequent time?

The thing I really love most about Inless Space 2 is probably not going to be very surprising to most listeners because they're the things that are very similar to the things people love about Endless legend, namely that amplitude of sort of approach this genre that has a massive stigma in terms of its presentation and its UI design and just its overall visual appeal to people and completely

approached it from a cool, stylish way so that you can sit down with this game that is

ostensibly a strategy game, but it's this gorgeous, fast, stylish looking experience,

as well as being something that is a you know, a really fundamentally sound strategy

game in its own right. So when I first reviewed the game for Kitaku, I was obviously,

you know, I'm a big amplitude fan. I love endless legend. I loved playing the, the early

access beta stuff for endless space too. I really enjoyed the first game with the disclaimer

that it,

um,

...