Elemental: War of Magic Reviews
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What one hand takes away (in terms of the heavy complexity of most empire strategy games), the other gives back in RPG elements and magic. Please do not misread that line to think this is even close to being an RPG. It is not. But the RPG elements that are incorporated -- level up, battles, quests and magic -- somehow add the glue that gives Elemental its potential.1UP arrives at a "C+", noting that it suffers from trying too much.
Battles are handled in their own screen much as HoMM and Disciples. Your army (in the screenshot just individual members not yet using stacks) is spread out on the left while the baddies are to the right. Each of your army gets their turns, and then the enemy gets to slap you around. You can move, act, or both. The order of attacks by your army is up to you. Simple, but engaging.
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Now the bad news. Elemental was shipped well before it should have been shipped. Stardock claims to the contrary -- that they needed to release a buggy download version because retailers were jumping the gun on box shipments -- do not seem to hold water. How did "good" software in the retail boxes suddenly become "bad" just because it was sold two days early?
The most serious problem was CTDs. After the first patch (1.05.016) these still were frequent and ruined gameplay even in the sandbox mode. A CTD 5-6 times per hour, plus most times I alt-tabbed out of the game, was the norm. Ugh!
And it slides downhill from there. The game world is filled with rival civilizations, unaffiliated baddies, and a variety of quests, battles, and other stuff for your hero units to do. But none of these civilizations or units possesses anything approaching decent A.I.: enemies frequently fail to guard their key cities (or the approaches thereto) and can be defeated early in the game with very rudimentary armies. Conquest victory in 30 turns, whee! In diplomacy, too, the A.I. is dumb to the point of silliness: in one game a rival faction importuned me to declare war on his enemy literally every turn for 25 turns until I finally overran his cities (with a vast army of four footsoldiers) just to shut him the hell up.
A huge contributing factor to both the ease-of-use (or lack thereof) problem and the A.I. idiocy is the total failure of Elemental to provide you with anything like a decent tutorial. Yes, there's a manual, and yes, there's a very basic "encyclopedia" thingy in the game to introduce you to core concepts, but neither of these describes how to achieve the goals the game sets out for you, and neither gives you any advice as to the best way to get started. Combat, for example, can be either auto-resolved, or fought mano-a-mano via a tactical interface. But how to control units in that tactical interface is left completely up to you to figure out, as are things like what special abilities enemies may have, how to cast spells using your heroes, and even how to retreat. If you want to put in the trial-and-error effort to figure this all out, God bless ya, but I just auto-resolved every battle -- I've got enough things in my life to make sense of without having to try to learn to play Elemental.
