I really, really like Elemental. It looks great, combat is fun, and the campaign does a great job of doling out new things to build and train at a pace that is enjoyable.

It's still far from accessible -- I looked and looked for a way to buy items from my merchant and couldn't figure it out. And in the end it's because it looks like peasants CAN'T shop (wow!). But I was able to buy items for my recruited character (a bard) and for my sovereign, so in the end I just stationed my peasants in the town and used the other characters to take care of the initial spiders.

A little later I was able to create a settler unit and then a foot soldier. The settler founded a second city and together with other units the foot soldiers helped us fight a quest related battle.

There are still rough edges. I'm not quite sure how units heal and when I stationed my sovereign within a city (but not inside it -- IOW, he wasn't stationed there) he began to heal but the card view of him didn't reflect this, so his vitals in the UI at the bottom middle of the screen showed his HP go up but the card didn't. A while later the two synced up but it was confusing.

Also, in-game help (tool tips, the hiergamenon) are pretty sparse and only somewhat helpful. The UI looks great but is kind of a mess.

No crashes, and no real performance problems that I can notice. I have a relatively low-end computer and to be honest, while I like games to look good if they are a little pokey I don't really care too much.

If you are on the fence about this game but like well made strategy games, I recommend it.