Stardock's slide continues with this broken, frustrating, muddied mess of a game.
Stardock's most recent release is a case study in designer arrogance.
Failing to learn from their last botched release, Demigod, Stardock has placed their shoes almost exactly in the footprints left by that release - and they haven't miraculously switched to head in the right direction. Another broken street date, another unfinished (literally) release, another just-plain-bad game.
Once, Stardock was the gamer's champion among developers and publishers. Now, they still wear that mask, but have learned to use it to manipulate and abuse the customer. Their "Gamer's Bill of Rights" is now a joke, all the more shameful in that they still promote it while actively defy the principles it espouses. Sell the gamer an unfinished game on the disc, willfully and knowingly, and finish it 'later' - using their money to fund the rest of the developement cycle. Only in the customer-service started video game industry would gamers roll over and accept this as good service, but if you're the type who does, I have a car I'd like to sell you. It's brand new, but I haven't put the wheels on or the transmission in. Once you get it home, I'll send them to you. Probably.
Enough with the soapbox, though. On to the meat of the game. From here on I'll be taking a look at the post 1.06 patched release, which Brad Wardell has stated is "totally ready for release." We'll start with the easier bits first.
Graphics - 2/10
Graphics are a subjective issue to me. I still go back and play gold box games, Betrayal at Krondor, Master of Magic, etc, and never think twice about the graphics. However, when you specifically adopt a less resource intensive, throwback art and graphic style, it had better work. Even with the toned-down graphics, which are charming in their water-color stylings in the overworld map but downright ugly in the tactical battles and portraits, Elemental's framerate will drop like a rock, outright crashing to < 5 FPS at times in developed maps. This is on a desktop system running an AMD Phenom II x6 and Radeon 5850's x2. Unacceptable.
Sound - 4/10
Not overly important to me, but there was clearly little effort put into sound effects or music here. The music is repetitious and generic, and the sound effects are consistently understated.
Presentation/Ease of Use - 0/10
Here's where the bottom drops out completely. Even once you've patched it up, stopped the crashing, and have Elemental running smoothly, you'll find that there's still a plethora of woes to trudge through. No tutorial. No information in the manual. Unintuitive control scheme. Compounding all of it, things here don't work the same as they do in other 4x games. Food useage and resource accrual have very unique implementations here, and they are not explained at any point. You are left to slog through hours upon hours of trial-and-error gameplay before figuring out how some of the mechanics work. Menus are cumbersome, seeming to take the long way around at any given opportunity - the more clicks needed to do something simple, no directions provided, the better, right? It seems like some covert-ops intelligence agency was behind the interface developement - if it's not over-complicated and confusing it's not worth doing.
Gameplay - 3/10
There are a lot of good ideas here. There are a lot of good ideas here that don't really work. Balance is not something that can even be mentioned in the same breath with this game. At higher levels, world mobs will crush certain types of empire, while they are able to be recruited by others. Mobs pop up randomly all over the map, and no matter how many resources you dump into your Warfare tech, they will often annihilate you if you auto-resolve. If you fight the tactical battle yourself, you can win easily - at the cost of participating in the most boring, over-extended combat sequences since... well, ever. Tactical Combat was an afterthought, the least finished and least polished element of the game, but it's the only way to make ANY use of all that research and development you've done. The AI is... there is no AI. I have watched enemy leaders commit suicide in hopeless attacks against fortified cities for no good tactical or strategic reason, ending entire games early, as the death of a sovereign outside his zone of control results in the elimination of the entire faction if there is no "heir." The AI is, in fact, so bad, that even on harder difficulty levels I often find myself moving superior armies out of the way of an inexplicably aggresive opponent simply to extend the game.
Here's a short list of some of the bugs, or just messiness and poor design, that permeates every aspect of the game.
- When selecting a city to choose upgrades, the city's statistics disappear. That's right - you can't view your upgrade/build panel at the same time as the city stats. Hope you have a good memory.
- Selecting a city will cause the camera to "lock" to that city, whether you have that option selected or not. The camera will stutter and jump if you try to scroll too far from the city without first unselecting it.
- For that matter, selecting cities sometimes requires multiple clicks before it takes. Click, click... click.. CLICK... finally.
- In one game, I killed an enemy Sovereign that I was at war with, only to watch her dead body (Literally the dead, prone sprite) continue to move around the world map, unatackable, her ruined civilization refusing to properly process it's defeat. It didn't continue to advance, either. Just a bunch of dead units "lag-sliding" all over my screen with no way to get rid of them.
- Cities will inexplicably refuse to let you perform upgrades that you meet all the requirements for.
- Certain spells can cause major gltiches in the landscape, such as Raise/Lower land. Not only is the newly created land graphically incoherent with existing land (it looks an island rammed up against the coast and slid under the continental shelf), but moving units over newly raised land can cause... you guessed it, crashing or freezing. Then again, just about any given click can cause crashing and freezing.
Note that these issues are all things I found post 1.07, in addition to the continuing prevelance of crashes and out of memory errors.
Elemental, in the end, just isn't very good even when it works. The confluence of all these ideas does not result in a playable or addictive experience. Maybe, possibly, with a lot of work, it can be a good strategy title in a year or so. As of this moment, even with patch 1.06, the only about it that stands on the same level as the giants of it's genre that it was trying to emulate or even dethrone - Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, even Civilization - is the "End Turn" button.