PC cases are, by and large, not the most attractive of objects. Sure, they now come in different shapes and sizes, and while black still dominates, look hard enough and you'll find a few more esoteric colours to choose from. But, even some of the more appealing examples aren't the sort of thing you'd put proudly on display in a home office, let alone have sat next to a TV in your living room. Enter the Bitfenix Pandora, an aluminium-clad Micro ATX and Mini-ITX case with a front-mounted LCD panel that eschews some the usual over-the-top gaming case touches for a design that's more refined, and far friendlier for the living room.

A Sleek Design

The Pandora is all about curves. Its aluminium side panels sweep from the back of the case all the way through the front, partly enclosing a glossy, mesh-free black front panel. It makes for a sleek and thoroughly striking design, one that I'd be happy to have sat atop a desk, rather than hidden away underneath one. For all its sleekness, though, the Pandora isn't a small case. Sure, it's smaller than your average mid-tower, and--thanks to there being no 5 1/2" drives bays--it's much slimmer too at just 160mm in width, but there's no doubt that you'll have to make room a significant amount of room for one in a living room setup.

The Pandora's size does mean there's a lot of space for components, though. There's support for MATX and M-ITX motherboards with up to five PCIe slots, GPUs up to 350mm in length, PSUs up to 180mm long, and up to a 240mm watercooling radiator on the front panel. Disappointingly, there's only room up top for a single 120mm fan, which acts as the sole exhaust for the case. There are plenty of ventilation holes, though, which makes it easy to set the case up for positive air pressure. There are also removable dust filters on the front and top fans. The front magnetic filter is, unfortunately, rather flimsy and doesn't feel all that secure, but the top filter is much studier and pops off with a push via a spring clip.

The top panel also houses two USB 3.0 ports, headphone and microphone jacks, power and rest switches, and a slot for a 3.5" hard drive, with another slot located underneath the cable management box near the front of the case. The cable management box also doubles up as a 2.5" drive mount, with space for another on the side of the side, and another on the back of the motherboard tray. That's not a whole lot of room for drives, so those with more ambitious storage requirements will want to look elsewhere.

Unique to the Pandora is a front mounted LCD panel (which hooks up to an internal USB 2.0 header) that you can use to display images up to 240x320 pixels in size. It's a neat feature, but the panel itself is of a poor quality, so unless you're looking at it straight on, the image gets washed out. The software is also rather basic, so there's no scope for more complex functions like temperature readouts or fans speeds, but Bitfenix is planning to release the display source code so more enterprising users can create their own software.

The Build

Thanks to the slim design of the Pandora, cable management is a bit of a struggle, but with a little work you can come up with a tidy layout that works well with the optional windowed side panel. The biggest problem lies with the CPU power cable. There's only a small section in the rear of the case for running cables, and that's only 15mm deep, meaning you have to run the CPU power cable across the front of the motherboard. There is a small space for tucking the cable away though, and with a little shoving it doesn't look too bad.

The cable management box in the front of the case works well for hiding most of the other cables, but a modular PSU is a must if you don't want them spilling out inside the case. A judicious use of cable ties is also a must in order to work with that small 15mm of space behind the motherboard tray; the side panels are held in via four push pins, and while this makes getting to the inside of the case relatively easy, they aren't secure enough for you to be able to use the panel to squeeze bulky cables out of the way.

Still, building inside the Pandora is, for the most part, a standard affair, and certainly much easier than the likes of Bitfenix's Prodigy M with its upside down PSU layout. One small annoyance, though, is the layout of the PCIe screws, which are tucked behind the aluminium side panel. To unscrew them easily Bitfenix supplies a right-angled allen key, which works fine, but will inevitably get lost within minutes of finishing your build, making it tricky to swap out PCIe cards in the future.

If you're planning on using air-cooling for your CPU, then the Pandora's width limits the height of cooler you can use to around 130mm. However, a watercooling unit like the Corsair H75 I used fits perfectly to the front of the case, and I'd recommend something similar given there's not a whole lot of airflow being pushed through the case. You also need to keep an eye on GPU height. The XFX 290X I used is raised just above the PCIe express slot and fitted fine, but beefier cards that extend further may not fit.

Verdict

The Bitfenix Pandora isn't quite a case of style over substance, but a few compromises have been made to achieve its slim design, and it isn't the case to choosing if you've got a lot of large components to house. It's also not the best choice for airflow, particularly given the Pandora is only supplied with two fans--you'll need to factor in the cost of another to mount on the front panel to keep things cool. Watercooling is far better option, but with only the front panel available for mounting a radiator, and with limited space inside, you're largely restricted to all-in-one units.

That said, if you can work through the compromises, the Pandora is a great looking case. The aluminium finish is top notch, and with a lack of visible vents on the front, it looks seriously sleek. With support for MATX motherboards, housing an SLI system is possible, but you'll want to stick with blower-style cards to ensure things don't get too toasty inside. At around $129 in the US and £95 in the UK, it's not the most expensive of cases either. There's also a version available without the gimmicky LCD display for around $110 in the US and £84 in the UK. Sure, you can get cases with more expandability and better cooling performance for the price, but few look anywhere near as good as the Pandora does.

It's difficult to know the breadth of the Endless universe through one game alone. The mythology tells of a galaxy conquered by the eponymous space-faring civilization, The Endless, and torn asunder by their subsequent civil war. Endless Legend picks up a small speck of that saga on the planet Auriga centuries after conflict sterilized the world.

That narrative is a fitting analog for Endless Legend: as life returns and new civilizations emerge to strike out on this familiar world, so too does developer Amplitude, returning to its roots in the realm of 4X tactical strategy. And those efforts are beautifully and familiarly realized. Legend toes the edge of unique and alien, and twists small flourishes into hallmark mechanics that set it apart. Yet in that same motion, the thoughtful focused attention elevating it also rends flesh from the bones of the structural skeleton, embedding small nicks that hamper the finished product.

First steps on Auriga are a delight of sights and sounds. The landscape is lusciously vivid, exploding with color and texture from the cold hues of arctic tundra through the flushed accents in arid deserts. Peeling back the numeric veil that overlays the topography reveals a place that uniformly impresses; such detail is paid to the wild landmarks, strange resource nodes, and mysterious ruins that it's easy to forget the statistic-crunching nature of civilization management and just get lost in the potential for adventure. Each lingering note from the wholly appropriate soundtrack fosters this façade: soothing with soulful strings and haunting chants that both sadden and inspire while foreign tones solidify the science-fantasy motif Legend so aptly delivers.

Navigating that experience is done through Endless Legend's powerful and friendly interface. Here, Legend's camerawork is stellar. Pulling in tight highlights the smallest details in the foreground while simultaneously rendering the distance just out of focus, instilling a pervading and artistic sense of vastness to the world. Retracting your gaze to a wide-angled view slowly reveals more and more until the detail falls away completely, replaced by an interactive parchment map of your known world that captures the essence of distant macromanagement defining so much of the genre.

Legend toes the edge of unique and alien, and twists small flourishes into hallmark mechanics that set it apart.

And to that degree, empire planning is as on-point in Endless Legend as we've come to expect from the tactical strategy space. Most key elements now associated with large-scale interaction between empires are all adequately represented and fleshed out to an effective degree: there is an era-based tech tree for research gains, a healthy city-building structure that draws from each tile's natural resources, and a diplomacy path that has provides substance while eschewing needless heft.

But the initial step toward conquest is the choice of faction to best represent your interests on Auriga, and here too, Amplitude has deftly worked style-centric decision-making into the recipe. The eight empires on tap run the spectrum of archetypes--the forest-folk Wild Walkers, the zerg-like Necrophages, and the nomadic, commerce-driven Roving Clans--and each carries its aesthetic and functional theme into the fray. Yet it's the special circumstances surrounding faction victory conditions that truly reinforce each culture as a unique play style.

Those Wild Walkers are expert builders whose natural proclivities tend toward a victory through construction of a wonder; Necrophages' endless hunger drives them to constant conflict to supplement their hindered food supplies with the corpses of the fallen, spurring them toward endless war and victory by elimination; and the Roving Clans, they can't go to war. Instead, they take a cut of marketplace dealings from every faction in a bid for the suggested economic victory. Still stranger is the Cult of the Eternal End, which can't build settlers and thus cannot expand through new cities, choosing instead to architect one great seat of religious power and gain the much-needed FISDI resources--Food, Industry, Science, Dust, and Influence--by enslaving the dozen-plus native factions into an army of converts.

In fact these neutral minor factions are the most serious threat to a budding empire, as their random node placement and penchant for fostering early-game armies of roaming monsters could cripple your efforts before they've begun--especially if you happen to start near one of the more difficult races, like the ghostlike Haunts. But by pacifying the node through fire, bribery, or favor, you're able to assimilate the race into your empire and generate its units as your own. And it's with the artificial intelligence that I take the biggest issue with Endless Legend. Once you've subjugated the immediate neutral factions, and that initial blow of uncertainty in the first two-to-three dozen turns has been weathered, the danger and drama of survival quickly begins to fade. Enemy empires rarely stake claim to your territory and only put up mild resistance when circumstances are reversed.

As I led the Vaulter faction--a science-minded, space-faring people that crashed on the planet long ago--across the many continents of Auriga, I occasionally expanded too fast and spread myself too thin, capturing enemy cities I wasn't yet prepared to defend. But even when I could see a massive neighboring army poised to retake this settlement, the counter-offensive was never mounted, leaving me to wonder what, if any, the point of this conflict is, given how these cultures don't care enough to participate. Endless Legends just isn't that difficult against AI opponents, and victory or quick elimination is more often than not determined in the first phase of a campaign.

But clashes with enemy units are a natural and regular part of Endless Legend, taking place directly on the campaign map rather than whisking both forces away to settle differences on a secondary battlefield. The boundaries of the engagement zone are overlaid and units disperse across the immediate hexagonal map tiles. While tactical considerations can be made with regard to tile terrain--forests provide certain defensive boosts, for example, and enemies on the high ground receive statistical advantages--overall combat in Legend is simplistic.

Skirmishes are capped at six turns before ending in a draw, understandably so, in an effort to prevent battle fatigue. Yet those titanic meetings between unstoppable forces and immovable objects, the kind that can live on in your memory well after the campaign ends, never get a chance to coalesce. Instead, battles are fairly small and straightforward affairs. All unit actions must be decided before each turn, and they require a degree of foresight, but statistical power and numbers almost always land you a victory. Those potential tactical nuances that allow for a victory in the face of utter annihilation have taken a back seat to simple arithmetic.

The most important aspect of conflict then becomes preparation, which Endless Legend does arguably better than any similar game. The addition of hero units add a spear tip to any army when upgraded through a dense skill tree, and outfitted with progressively more effective weapons and armor. Hero units are a vital part of any empire, and honing them into army-crushing killers or economy-focused city governors is as simple as obtaining the right skills and equipment.

Endless Legends just isn't that difficult against AI opponents, and victory or quick elimination is more often than not determined in the first phase of a campaign.

This customization also carries over to units themselves. It's possible to create fully outfitted units from their base models provided you have the resources to reliably recruit them, as equipment quickly bloats unit cost. In this way, rather than simply mass-producing expendable default soldiers, a much closer bond can be forged between you and your faction. When effort and resources are amply invested in heroes and units--and even customizable factions--their fates and wellbeings are more than just a means to an end.

And the end is nigh. The opening arc of nearly every faction references the relapse of a great cataclysm, imparting a feeling of timeliness to expand your empire before the clock winds out. The overall strategy of gameplay reinforces this feeling by incorporating a two-season structure: summers are fertile and bountiful times when life and expansion bloom, while resources, troop movement and empire happiness are significantly gashed during the harsh winters. As the game progresses, the summers become shorter and winters longer; as I neared the 300th turn, the warm unbinding climates were brief respites from the cold truth that winter was coming. It's a feature that can be mitigated by savvy technology spending, but the flow of seasons still provides a fantastic feeling of impending dread.

So, too, do Legend's narrative arcs, which take the form of in-game faction-specific quest chains that escalate toward each empire's unique victory condition. Sadly, these quests are the closest this strategy game comes to a guided campaign or story mode; the incorporated lore and writing are an absolute high point, and tapping that creative vein could have made for an amazing, driven experience. Completing each step of the many available quests nearly always bestows items of value, such as resources, new technologies, and legendary artifacts, but quests are more than just a means to an end: they are an integral part of Legend's high-fantasy character .

What I admire about Endless Legend the most is its constant ability to define itself, serving as its own analog: a storied backdrop, an endless well of hope for each comparatively youthful faction as they strike out, the growing pains and oversights that could cripple a nation, and the inevitable scramble to reach full potential before the coming storm and doom. So too did I bristle at the possibilities of each new game, maintaining that excitement well into an established empire, and scrambling to find new challenges when faced with the inevitability of the end.

Each new game in Endless Legend feels different and exciting thanks to its well-crafted factions and earliest uncertain moments, but those initial distinctive stories begin to meld at some point therein, becoming the same experience. Yet it's hard not to look at the experience as something very special, and that "just one more turn" hook that's essential for games of this ilk to survive is certainly alive and well. Endless Legend's driving forces are so thoroughly executed that it serves as an imperfect, but well worthwhile step in the series, and hopefully a sign of things to come.

It's difficult to know the breadth of the Endless universe through one game alone. The mythology tells of a galaxy conquered by the eponymous space-faring civilization, The Endless, and torn asunder by their subsequent civil war. Endless Legend picks up a small speck of that saga on the planet Auriga centuries after conflict sterilized the world.

That narrative is a fitting analog for Endless Legend: as life returns and new civilizations emerge to strike out on this familiar world, so too does developer Amplitude, returning to its roots in the realm of 4X tactical strategy. And those efforts are beautifully and familiarly realized. Legend toes the edge of unique and alien, and twists small flourishes into hallmark mechanics that set it apart. Yet in that same motion, the thoughtful focused attention elevating it also rends flesh from the bones of the structural skeleton, embedding small nicks that hamper the finished product.

First steps on Auriga are a delight of sights and sounds. The landscape is lusciously vivid, exploding with color and texture from the cold hues of arctic tundra through the flushed accents in arid deserts. Peeling back the numeric veil that overlays the topography reveals a place that uniformly impresses; such detail is paid to the wild landmarks, strange resource nodes, and mysterious ruins that it's easy to forget the statistic-crunching nature of civilization management and just get lost in the potential for adventure. Each lingering note from the wholly appropriate soundtrack fosters this façade: soothing with soulful strings and haunting chants that both sadden and inspire while foreign tones solidify the science-fantasy motif Legend so aptly delivers.

Navigating that experience is done through Endless Legend's powerful and friendly interface. Here, Legend's camerawork is stellar. Pulling in tight highlights the smallest details in the foreground while simultaneously rendering the distance just out of focus, instilling a pervading and artistic sense of vastness to the world. Retracting your gaze to a wide-angled view slowly reveals more and more until the detail falls away completely, replaced by an interactive parchment map of your known world that captures the essence of distant macromanagement defining so much of the genre.

Legend toes the edge of unique and alien, and twists small flourishes into hallmark mechanics that set it apart.

And to that degree, empire planning is as on-point in Endless Legend as we've come to expect from the tactical strategy space. Most key elements now associated with large-scale interaction between empires are all adequately represented and fleshed out to an effective degree: there is an era-based tech tree for research gains, a healthy city-building structure that draws from each tile's natural resources, and a diplomacy path that has provides substance while eschewing needless heft.

But the initial step toward conquest is the choice of faction to best represent your interests on Auriga, and here too, Amplitude has deftly worked style-centric decision-making into the recipe. The eight empires on tap run the spectrum of archetypes--the forest-folk Wild Walkers, the zerg-like Necrophages, and the nomadic, commerce-driven Roving Clans--and each carries its aesthetic and functional theme into the fray. Yet it's the special circumstances surrounding faction victory conditions that truly reinforce each culture as a unique play style.

Those Wild Walkers are expert builders whose natural proclivities tend toward a victory through construction of a wonder; Necrophages' endless hunger drives them to constant conflict to supplement their hindered food supplies with the corpses of the fallen, spurring them toward endless war and victory by elimination; and the Roving Clans, they can't go to war. Instead, they take a cut of marketplace dealings from every faction in a bid for the suggested economic victory. Still stranger is the Cult of the Eternal End, which can't build settlers and thus cannot expand through new cities, choosing instead to architect one great seat of religious power and gain the much-needed FISDI resources--Food, Industry, Science, Dust, and Influence--by enslaving the dozen-plus native factions into an army of converts.

In fact these neutral minor factions are the most serious threat to a budding empire, as their random node placement and penchant for fostering early-game armies of roaming monsters could cripple your efforts before they've begun--especially if you happen to start near one of the more difficult races, like the ghostlike Haunts. But by pacifying the node through fire, bribery, or favor, you're able to assimilate the race into your empire and generate its units as your own. And it's with the artificial intelligence that I take the biggest issue with Endless Legend. Once you've subjugated the immediate neutral factions, and that initial blow of uncertainty in the first two-to-three dozen turns has been weathered, the danger and drama of survival quickly begins to fade. Enemy empires rarely stake claim to your territory and only put up mild resistance when circumstances are reversed.

As I led the Vaulter faction--a science-minded, space-faring people that crashed on the planet long ago--across the many continents of Auriga, I occasionally expanded too fast and spread myself too thin, capturing enemy cities I wasn't yet prepared to defend. But even when I could see a massive neighboring army poised to retake this settlement, the counter-offensive was never mounted, leaving me to wonder what, if any, the point of this conflict is, given how these cultures don't care enough to participate. Endless Legends just isn't that difficult against AI opponents, and victory or quick elimination is more often than not determined in the first phase of a campaign.

But clashes with enemy units are a natural and regular part of Endless Legend, taking place directly on the campaign map rather than whisking both forces away to settle differences on a secondary battlefield. The boundaries of the engagement zone are overlaid and units disperse across the immediate hexagonal map tiles. While tactical considerations can be made with regard to tile terrain--forests provide certain defensive boosts, for example, and enemies on the high ground receive statistical advantages--overall combat in Legend is simplistic.

Skirmishes are capped at six turns before ending in a draw, understandably so, in an effort to prevent battle fatigue. Yet those titanic meetings between unstoppable forces and immovable objects, the kind that can live on in your memory well after the campaign ends, never get a chance to coalesce. Instead, battles are fairly small and straightforward affairs. All unit actions must be decided before each turn, and they require a degree of foresight, but statistical power and numbers almost always land you a victory. Those potential tactical nuances that allow for a victory in the face of utter annihilation have taken a back seat to simple arithmetic.

The most important aspect of conflict then becomes preparation, which Endless Legend does arguably better than any similar game. The addition of hero units add a spear tip to any army when upgraded through a dense skill tree, and outfitted with progressively more effective weapons and armor. Hero units are a vital part of any empire, and honing them into army-crushing killers or economy-focused city governors is as simple as obtaining the right skills and equipment.

Endless Legends just isn't that difficult against AI opponents, and victory or quick elimination is more often than not determined in the first phase of a campaign.

This customization also carries over to units themselves. It's possible to create fully outfitted units from their base models provided you have the resources to reliably recruit them, as equipment quickly bloats unit cost. In this way, rather than simply mass-producing expendable default soldiers, a much closer bond can be forged between you and your faction. When effort and resources are amply invested in heroes and units--and even customizable factions--their fates and wellbeings are more than just a means to an end.

And the end is nigh. The opening arc of nearly every faction references the relapse of a great cataclysm, imparting a feeling of timeliness to expand your empire before the clock winds out. The overall strategy of gameplay reinforces this feeling by incorporating a two-season structure: summers are fertile and bountiful times when life and expansion bloom, while resources, troop movement and empire happiness are significantly gashed during the harsh winters. As the game progresses, the summers become shorter and winters longer; as I neared the 300th turn, the warm unbinding climates were brief respites from the cold truth that winter was coming. It's a feature that can be mitigated by savvy technology spending, but the flow of seasons still provides a fantastic feeling of impending dread.

So, too, do Legend's narrative arcs, which take the form of in-game faction-specific quest chains that escalate toward each empire's unique victory condition. Sadly, these quests are the closest this strategy game comes to a guided campaign or story mode; the incorporated lore and writing are an absolute high point, and tapping that creative vein could have made for an amazing, driven experience. Completing each step of the many available quests nearly always bestows items of value, such as resources, new technologies, and legendary artifacts, but quests are more than just a means to an end: they are an integral part of Legend's high-fantasy character .

What I admire about Endless Legend the most is its constant ability to define itself, serving as its own analog: a storied backdrop, an endless well of hope for each comparatively youthful faction as they strike out, the growing pains and oversights that could cripple a nation, and the inevitable scramble to reach full potential before the coming storm and doom. So too did I bristle at the possibilities of each new game, maintaining that excitement well into an established empire, and scrambling to find new challenges when faced with the inevitability of the end.

Each new game in Endless Legend feels different and exciting thanks to its well-crafted factions and earliest uncertain moments, but those initial distinctive stories begin to meld at some point therein, becoming the same experience. Yet it's hard not to look at the experience as something very special, and that "just one more turn" hook that's essential for games of this ilk to survive is certainly alive and well. Endless Legend's driving forces are so thoroughly executed that it serves as an imperfect, but well worthwhile step in the series, and hopefully a sign of things to come.