This magic fizzled
Therefore, you might understand why I was VERY excited at the news that Stardock was making a "spiritual successor" to Master of Magic - Elemental: War of Magic.
Stardock has rolled out some GREAT games: Galactic Civilizations and all the other similar 4X games and expansions to that very successful franchise. They really seem to support their product and allow for others to add mods as well.
While I missed the Beta for Elemental, I did pre-order the game from Stardock – that's how confident I was that this game was sure to be a hit.
I started to worry when one of the designers started debunking poor reviews during a pre-release demo.
Soon after I downloaded it and started playing I realized my hopes had hit the rocks.
There were three patches within the first week alone. The early game was pretty awful. Add to the fact that there was no tutorial and no manual, I felt a little lost.
The most recent patch 1.06 makes any prior games that you may have spent hours playing now unplayable.
I have played the game for about 20 hours now. The game has crashed on me twice. For most of the first week, the tactical combat didn't work. Even after 1.06 I still experience problems in tactical combat.
The game performance slows to a crawl after a while – is there a memory leak in the game?
Most concerning to me – where was the fun? Will that be added in the next patch?
While I am pretty down on the game I am more disappointed that a good company like Stardock would let this product be released when it was so clearly not ready.
I sincerely hope that there is a jewel of a game buried somewhere below and that Stardock unearths it, because I really want to enjoy this game.
Again, the company had a good track record of supporting their games, so I hope to come back and give the game a more positive review, but after they took my money two weeks ago, I am pretty frustrated.