My number one issue with this game is that it's boring. There, I said it. And if you haven't freaked out yet and are typing an angry respnose about haters, Civ-fanboys and so on, let me explain.
First, look at the title. Elemental: War of magic. War. Of magic. Two spellcasters throwing fireballs at each other are just a simple fight. We are talking war. That means armies of spellcasters and magical creatures clashing together and destroying everything that gets between them. Cities are blown to pieces, mountains are sunk into the oceans, oceans boiling, basically the whole world almost being destroyed in the process. And what did we get instead? The occasional fireball and +1 sword. That's underwhelming, to say the least.
But nevermind that, let's look at the magical creatures. Surely they have them, right? I mean this is a spiritual successor to Master of Magic, right? Well, sort of. You can get some magical creatures later, but not many. And even then they are very late in the game. We hear all the time about monsters roaming the wilderness, but have anyone actually seen any? Giant spiders don't count. Bears and wolves are animals, not monsters. I want a large section of the map to be dedicated giants. I want to go into a lair full of giantic ants. I want an army of lizardmen threatening my kingdom. Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations had whole factions of aliens, so why can't Elemental have whole factions based around monstrs? Why are every single faction human?
Which leads us to customization. What's the point? We have a dozen factions of humans, yet they are all the same. Some have blue skin, but that's just cosmetic stuff. Both Fallen and, um, un-Fallen (forgot their name) have the same spells, the same units and the same skills. The gameplay is fun, but it gets dull fast if there aren't any variation,.
So what about the roleplaying stuff, then? Surely that has to be the thing they focused on? Um... no. Go there, fight that, pick up that. Repeat ad inifinite. I stopped reading quest descriptions a long time ago simply because I failed to see a point. They all send me to some other place, and once I'm there, I some times fight stuff, sometimes don't. They are all the same. Why can't someone send me to slay a dragon? What about an army of undead rising somewhere? What about saving the usual damsell in distress? For all I know I might have done all of that withiout noticing. If you can't tell the difference between slaying a horde of dragons and slaying a horde of small rats, there has to be something very wrong somewhere.
So I stand for what I said. Elemental is boring. It has a lot of potential and could one day be far better and more popular than even Civilization, but right now it's dull, uninspired and lacks any variation what so ever. Oh, sure, I got my lizardmen and undead factions through mods, but we shouldn't have to. And for that matter, when I got the collector's edition in the mail, I got a sweet tin dragon with it. So... where are the dragons in the game? Are there any? How the f*** can a fantasy-game called War of magic fail to have dragons in it?
