Product Details
 | Elemental "War of Magic" |
| List Price: | $49.99 |
| Price: | $48.93 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details |
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com
9 new or used available from $39.95
Average customer review:
Product Description
An immersive, magical world controlled by powerful Sovereigns. Seamless blend of traditional turn-based strategy, city building and role-playing elements. Two rich single-player can choose to fight for the Empire or the Fallen - 30 + hours of game play.Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #10087 in Video Games
- Brand: Stardock
- Model: 708192010806
- Released on: 2010-08-24
- ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
- Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows XP
- Format: DVD-ROM
Features
- Take control as the magical Sovereign
- Recruit heroes
- Explore dungeons
- Collect treasure
- Tactical battles
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Product Description
Product Description
From the Manufacturer
Tactical Battles
Design and Train your Soldiers
Collect Treasure
War of Magic
Elemental is a fantasy strategy game set on a world filled with magic and ancient lore. Rule a fledgling kingdom and expand it across the world through a combination of magical power, military might, diplomatic skill, technological advancement and bold adventuring. As sovereign, you begin as the only being in your kingdom still able to channel power from the shards of magic, a series of mystical artifacts left over from the cataclysm. You must decide how much of your power to imbue into your heroes as you build new cities, explore dungeons, perfect spells of ever increasing power and negotiate with friends and foes. Victory can be yours through conquest, magical supremacy, diplomatic alliances or the completion of the master quest. You are the sovereign. Your people need you. So-called "adventurers" have entered the forbidden dungeon of Ithyrl and unleashed the long banished demon Kroxir, killing them in the process. Lord Ventir menaces your southern border with his army of death knights. The Sorceress Procipinee has claimed your northern cities as being part of her domain and the ancient dragon Smarag has agreed to aid you if you recover her eggs that were stolen by a different party of adventurers. It's all in a day's work in Stardock's new epic strategy game, Elemental: War of Magic. Customization, Magic, Warfare, Empire Building and more Design your sovereign in terms of talents, class, even what he (or she) looks like. Learn spells of increasing power to unleash on those who oppose you. Found new cities and build them up by researching new technologies, recruiting specialists or trading knowledge with other Kingdoms. Send your champions on holy quests to recover ancient artifacts, gain allies, or recover the great wealth lost during the Cataclysm. A strategy game in an RPG world In Elemental, you design and train your soldiers, archers, knights, magicians and more. With a vast storage of lore developed in collaboration with publishing giant Random House, Elemental ensures that every game is a completely new experience.Key Features:
- Take control as the magical Sovereign
- Recruit heroes
- Explore dungeons
- Collect treasure
- Tactical battles
- Intergrated editors
Customer Reviews
Unfinished Beta
To give you an idea of how
prematurely released this game is, it was suppose to be spiritual
successor to MoM, and magic is a major portion of the game and key
design feature as evidenced by the title. Yet Shards, a major portion of
the magic system, is not functional, and the whole magic system is
underwhelming. The AI is laughable. For instance, AI Sovereigns suicide
by solo attacking with major disadvantages.
The campaign included
in the game is called Book I. There are no other books. Supposedly,
more will be included at a later date, like a functional multiplayer.
The
list of bugs and quirks is quite long. Poor documentation. No coherent
design. Many review sites are delaying their reviews because they do not
want to give Stardock a low score. I suggest waiting until this thing
is not at AAA price. Shouldn't take long for a sale.
Would you buy a car, at sticker, with no
transmission?
I read all the reviews on
this game, albeit after I had purchased the game and played it.
Hindsight is 20/20 for those of us with the game. Fortunately those of
you who have not purchased the game yet can benefit from our hindsight.
The
reviews fit into three categories:
1. Early rave reviews of 4-5
stars.
2. Later reviews stating how great a company Stardock is and
how much Stardock will improve the game in the
future (read: the game
stinks now, but if you are willing to part with $50, we promise to
really really try
to fix the problems).
3. Terrible reviews.
Reviewers who state the game is unplayable, a giant mod exercise, and
crash prone.
I suspect the first set were developers or beta
players with an active interest, of some sort, in the product's survival
(or who just really love frustration). The second are surely employees.
Who else would recommend you buy a defective product now and wait for
upgrades? "take this here car off my lot (at sticker), and I promise you
I will mail you the other three wheels, and should I still be in
business after that, I will send you the transmission too!".
The
third group is undoubtedly players like myself.
It is
frustrating, because there are so many great ideas. Hire out champions,
train them up, imbue them with magic, buy them stuff, and take on the
monsters. All while building a civization, creating seige weapons,
training dragons, and researching great spells. If only the other three
wheels met pavement.
Stardock has spent the majority of its time
fixing bugs. Like the dreaded blue screen of death/crashdump. You
probably haven't seen one of these since Windows ME circa 2000. Get
ready for one every 2-3 hours. And no, they still haven't fixed that.
With all the time the developers have spent on crashdumps, they haven't
yet gotten to the lower hanging fruit, so there are no instructions
unless you want to delve through several strings of several forums.
Should you be willing, you will then find that the game balance is
seriously slanted toward the Empires. Don't bother playing humans, it
would be like sending the the hobbits of the shire to fight for the
humans and elves against Sauron and his entire ruthless army. Actually,
that would be kind of fun, were you playing Sauron, which happily you
can, so long as you can stand all the computer restarts from crashes.
And
victory conditions other than steamrolling the hobbits? You can do a
Master Quest or a Spell of Ending or even a diplomacy ending. I haven't
figured them out. Luckily Stardock hasn't published them either. That
way they can stay super secret! Even better the victory conditions are't
on the web. Or the forums. That way you can keep playing until they
send you those tires.
There are more instructions for dealing
with constant crashes (download the hotfix, which notably doesn't fix
the problem) than there are for playing the game.
I strongly
recommend that you save your money. Forever. If you seriously think that
Stardock will actually fix all of these problems, ever, then I have a
copy of Dai Katana waiting for you! Only $50!
Addendum:
Upon
reflection I have come to the conclusion that the game has some
fundamental balance issues that mere patching won't fix. The
Empire/Human problem is inherent in the game design. The problem is that
units take population units to create. So if you play a human kingdom,
your path to success is to research civilzation improvements. To do so,
you need large cities producing lots of research. Producing troops
ensures your survival, but runs counter to your victory conditions. But
Empire gets techs like "larger housing" so that they can get much higher
populations, meaning that they can both produce techs AND huge armies
with which to pulverize the humans.
Septemer 22nd:
Stardock
CEO Brad Wardell claims that Stardock was "Completely blind [to the
game problems]", and that, "it wasn't a time issue, the product was
simply released poorly" in statements explaining layoffs of Elemental
design team members. The more likely explanation is that like the afore
mentioned Daikatana, the studio was experiencing financial problems from
a lengthy development process and rushed the product to market in hopes
of recouping losses. It seems impossible that developers, Quality
Assessment, and beta-testers didn't note the frequent crashes, lack of a
user manual, lack of multiplayer, and horrific game balance.
With
only 85,000 sales and a burgeoning aftermarket of half price unopened
copies of Elemental, the "blind" release of Elemental is becoming an
industry case study comparable only to Daikatana. It might have been
better for Stardock's stock to have just buried the title. Wardell
states that they have not cut core designers, but layoffs tend to
encourage core team members to send out resumes.
Stardock
developers are supposedly going to stop fixing major bugs and start
focusing on content adds starting with fix 1.0. This change seems odd in
that the developers admit they have not fixed the memory leak issue,
problems with ATI graphics cards, and still have intermittent and
unexplained crashes. Those foolish enough to continue attempting to play
Elemental are reporting continued AI and balance issues (I sold my copy
for $20 after 1.06 failed to make the game playable, much less
enjoyable). Did I mention I had to reinstall Windows 7 to make the
crashes stop after uninstalling Elemental? Balance, AI, memory leaks,
and crashes sound like core issues to me, which makes me question
whether the core developers responsible for these domains remain
employed at Stardock.
I wouldn't count on fixes for these issues
and it doesn't sound like Stardock or the design team has any confidence
in their ability to fix these issues, much less remain solvent as a
development team. Instead, it sounds like they are going to start
handing out DLC candy in hopes that the smoke and mirrors will make you
forget the glaring issues with the game: that Elemental functions
intermittently, and when it does function has a poor AI and little game
balance. It has only been out a few weeks, and you can already get it
for half price on the used market, that should tell you all you need to
know!
The only good news for Stardock is that apparently
Civilization 5 has not been well received either.
Civ 5: I take
that back, Civ 5 is amazing. RIP Elemental.
Do not buy. Get a refund if you did
I pre-ordered this game
thinking it was going to be the long awaited successor to Master of
Magic, one of my favorite turn based strategy games. What a mistake.
This game constantly crashes, has terrible lag between turns, the
animations are unwatchable due to terrible framerates, and there are
massive glitches with the AI and game balance. These are just SOME of
the major issues. There are too many little issues to even mention. A
quick glimpse at the official support forums will show just how many
problems there really are. There are over 1100 issues being reported.
Even if half of them are duplicates or irrelevant, that is still over
500 bugs, a lot of them critical or game stopping. I've written more fun
and stable games when I was just starting out as a comp sci major in
college and had no idea what I was doing. This game is a special kind of
torture. The book is just as bad, if not worse.
I have never
asked for a refund on any game I have ever purchased. This game was the
first one to make me do so.
No comments:
Post a Comment