Game Reviews

In other words: some of us may be lucky enough to have a fantastic idea, design, thought, whatever, locked up inside our imaginations, but all too often some ineffable force, some unknown obstacle prevents us from making that idea a workable reality.

Such is the unhappy case with Elemental: War of Magic, the new 4X game from Brad Wardell. When playing it, experienced strategy fans will doubtless be able to feel the good ideas, the years of design experience, and the sense that the game is striving for that "just one more turn" addictiveness factor. Somewhere along the way, though, those intangible parts, excellent as they are, turn into a terribly flawed reality -- one rife with bugs, burdened by an awful GUI and less user-friendliness than the One Ring, and wielding graphics that would look right at home in a Dire Straits video.

What happened? We may never know. But Elemental should be a lesson for ambitious designers to make sure they ground their ambitions in the realities of the resources they have at hand. Clearly, this game's reach exceeds its meager grasp. For what it's worth, Elemental tries hard to be the spiritual successor of a fantastic turn-based strategy game cum RPG called Master of Magic. As in MOM, Elemental players take on the role of various wizard-kings (one in particular, if they choose to play the main campaign) who are on a quest to rule the world. As in most games of this type, you can accomplish your world domination plot either through conquest, diplomacy, or research, but however you choose to do it, you'll have to focus on exploration, warfare, city-building, and leveling your characters. Like Master of Magic (which was itself quite buggy and not without gameplay foibles), Elemental suffers from trying to do too much. It's admirable that the game offers you the wide variety of gameplay choices it does, but the fact that it doesn't concomitantly offer you the ability to easily manage the information necessary to make those choices intelligently is its Achilles heel.