While the Endless games have some of the best world-building in their genre, they're not likely to be spoiled by visiting those worlds before they're quite finished. Usually, it's those with a strong narrative component that I'm accustomed to avoiding until they're complete, or close to complete.

Some games are ill-suited to Early Access. Endless Space might not have ripped up the rulebook, but it took a whole packet full of markers to it and went to town. It was a thrilling game because it felt like a genuinely inventive release in a genre that often looks to the past and iterates slowly around set ideas. It contained good ideas that didn't quite reach their potential and other ideas that might have been better off never having left the drawing board. In an odd way, the imperfections were the things that excited me most about Endless Space. Its mythology of Dust and its collection of weird and often sinister factions helped it to stand out and its universe has only become stranger with the addition of Endless Legend and Dungeon of the Endless, which expand on the setting in unusual ways. The original Endless Space excited me because though it was a sci-fi 4X game, it didn't seem like it had been drawn exclusively from experience of the usual suspects (Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations) but from some of the more unusual suspects as well (Ascendancy, Sins of a Solar Empire), and it had heaps of home-grown qualities to go alongside those influences. And now, I'm not planning to go back until the Early Access period is done. Instead, I've been playing another 4X game and didn't find a spare minute to look at Amplitude's latest until this weekend just gone. Now that Endless Space 2 is available in Early Access, I should be soaking it up, exploring every corner of what already exists and speculating about the shape of things to come.

Actually, I've been looking forward to Endless Space 2 since I played the first Endless Space and a wonderful feeling washed over me – here, in Amplitude, was an exciting new studio making strategy games that were forward-thinking and unafraid to muck around with genre conventions. I've been looking forward to Endless Space 2 since around the time I played Endless Legend and fell for it hard. This week, Brendan is away so Adam did the only thing he knows how to do: he spent a few hours playing a strategy game. Every Monday we jettison Brendan into the uncharted quadrants of early access and demand constant progress reports.

Endless space command points