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Oh my god. What happened?
It is very difficult to talk about the gameplay of Elemental for one very simple reason: this is not a finished game. Oh, sure, you can load it, and it runs. But the design of the game feels frayed at the edges. It is a tangled weave of half-hearted ideas that becomes impossible to comprehend. Elemental isn't the wonderful strategy game I expected. Instead it is a warning to designers everywhere. HARK, DESIGNERS! THOU WILL NOT BITE MORE THAN THOU CAN CHEW, LEST YOU BE FORCED TO SPIT OUT YOUR MEAL!
There is a lot going on in Elemental. City building seems to be half-way between Civilization and SimCity. You build upgrades, but you actually place them on the map. However, the placement doesn't seem to matter, and it is sometimes unclear why some buildings are not available while others are. I get the sense that Stardock was going somewhere with this mechanic but didn’t have time to finish it.
Or let's consider combat. The idea of adding turn-based strategy combat to a fantasy oriented strategy game is cool, but again Stardock has missed the mark. The turn based combat, as it exists currently, is little more than a blueprint. Units rarely possess interesting abilities, and the combat maps all appear to be identical, perfectly flat rectangles. Luck is also a huge factor thanks to weapon damage rolls that have huge variance. Combat in Elemental is like playing Dungeons & Dragons with nothing but a twenty sided die.
