Elemental: War of Magic Reviews

A trio of new reviews for Stardock’s Elemental: War of Magic surfaced overnight, but unfortunately none of them are overly favorable.

G4 hits it with a 2/5:

What’s most frustrating is that in the rare moments when the game fires on all cylinders its as engrossing, addictive and engaging as the other great empire-building strategy games it seeks to emulate the a game ending crash or inexplicable road block rears its head and frustration returns.

We truly want to play and love the perfect version of Elemental: War of Magic that Stardock has in mind. Unfortunately, we don’t have it installed on our hard drive just yet.

GameInformer goes with a 6.5/10:

Elemental has a great feature list, of which unit customization is just the start. Diplomacy incorporates an abstract “diplomatic capital” number, quantifying a previously nebulous concept that is nonetheless central to real-life negotiations. Tactical combat lets you battle it out wargame-style, commanding the forces you’ve painstakingly assembled on the battlefield. Research is approached in a novel way, where each subsequent advance in a field is more expensive to research but you can pick them up in the order you choose. The Adventuring tech tree in particular is brilliant; it perfectly fits the concept of rebuilding civilization from the shattered remnants of the ancients by revealing new resources for your cities to harvest as well as additional quest locations for your heroes to explore. These are great ideas taken individually, but Elemental fails to bind them together into a cohesive game.

My intense 4X fandom has been conquered by Elemental’s nonstop irritations. I’m putting it down for now, but I’m not writing the game off forever. Galactic Civilizations II and the Ironclad-developed Sins of a Solar Empire both demonstrated that Stardock often supports its games after release with free new content, and Elemental’s first week alone featured multiple helpful patches. I dig the game’s vibe and want nothing more than to lose myself in building fantasy kingdoms. Maybe a few months of patches will get the game to a state where I can do that, but for now I’m not recommending this to Civilization nerds, much less strategy-curious gamers.

And GamerNode comes up with a 2/5, too:

Presentation is also a weak element. The music is composed of the same two fantasy orchestral tracks on repeat, and the graphical style is comprised of dark, two-tone colors and cartoonish characters that look like they belong in a Saturday morning cartoon instead of a dark fantasy game.

It’s surprising that Stardock would release Elemental in the condition it’s in. The game is unfinished in every respect, lacking features that are standard in current 4X games and in video games in general. It’s a confusing mess that buries all of its interesting features under bad decisions and broken mechanics.