Elemental: War of Magic Reviews
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And Stardock are usually the good guys: they wrote a Gamer's Bill of Rights that says we deserve finished games out of the box. Their skills at producing fun AI are unmatched in the industry. They have perhaps the only team capable of doing this ridiculous game idea justice.
Instead, they've taken more than three years of work and kicked it out in a state that's turned anticipation into outrage, community excitement to shared disappointment, and the goodwill of fanboys like me into total dismay.
As a game? It's pretty good. As a decision? An utter disaster.
And then we have a similarly themed review that arrives at a "C" at GameShark:
Elemental is clearly a game that had too many ideas and too much love there is a core game with an evolving world full of adventure here. The world isn't that interesting, but interesting things could happen here. Quests of great promise that force you to negotiate passage into enemy lands, for example; this can happen, but the rewards are never worth the risk. A greater incentive to police your lands to keep brigands and robbers out; Stardock's Galactic Civilizations 2 has a morale meter that would fit well in a situation like this. Given Stardock's history and the many brilliant ideas here, there is every indication that by year's end this will be a strategy game worth looking at.
But we can only look at what we have now. Elemental is now undercooked with no incentive to keep sitting down to dinner. With more variety and more clarity, Stardock's fantasy world might tell stories you would tell your friends. It's a shame it insisted on trying to tell them now.
