What was their criticism? Has EL2 changed since given how positive it seems to have been received? Currently at 600+ with 87% on steam.
It's hard to judge from a beta with tons of unfinished content and buggy UI, but...
The base-building and economics were boring. You can only build very basic improvements on each tile, and only if you've researched them first, and only if you spend influence to buy the tile first. So on a tile with hammers and food, you could build a food-boosting improvement or a hammer-boosting improvement and that's it. Later on you can upgrade it if you research the upgrade for that individual improvement. But instead of waiting 20 turns to make a building that gives you +4 food, you could just buy two tiles with influence that give you +2 food
each. My friend spent most of their time building units, cause there was nothing else worth making. If you can spend money or influence to instantly build something, then those are the only resources that matter.
The races were pretty weird and had their own powers that my friend couldn't understand at all. In EL1 I never liked the mage faction because I couldn't figure out how the fuck their magic was supposed to work. Same problem. One faction had to build observation towers on cliffs outside of your territory, one per region; then you could activate an ability to terraform the land around it into desert, which benefits you
somehow, and then you can build more improvements on the desert, except the land isn't actually part of your territory and it takes forever to colonize it, assimilate it and convert it into a full city.
The game follows a similar path to Civ 7, where the map starts small and expands as the game goes on, as floods recede and reveal more of the map. But until then, it feels like you're stuck on a starting island with nothing to do.
Combat was pretty mediocre and somehow worse than EL1 or Humankind, which both had their own problems but were at least fun. The hero system is weirdly complicated and full of too many different mechanics and ideas.
The faction quests that drive your progress aren't great either; the dialogue was overwritten, boring, dense, and didn't hold my friend's interest. The mushroom faction quests in EL1 were great: you play as a woman who merged with a mushroom consciousness deep underground, who wants to take revenge on the people that wiped out her race, only to find them long dead and try to find a way to cope.
