Elemental has no proper tutorial, but it's not even clear if that would help. This is a complex design with a lot of little things going on. Descriptor text would suffice in most cases, but there is very little of this. So you have this rich world full of options that will prove incomprehensible to all but the most willing gamers.

Given Stardock's reputation, that may be whom they are courting in any case. Though poorly explained, things do make sense after a while. But then you have to face a game where some of the core concepts are under thought.

Why, for example, does magic feel so useless? A fireball does less damage than your average sword and your sovereign is not really barred from researching any magic track. Therefore, you can research pretty much any spell, but will generally fall back on the biggest battalions.

The tactical battles are never very interesting because so many of the units are basic melee guys and you will have run roughshod over the map before you get to anything interesting. If you use the auto-resolve, the attack rating will be all you need to worry about as hordes of peasants and observers take city after city. Lead the rabble to victory and feel like a king, I suppose. In most cases you don't even need to worry about the AI opponents. They will send out tiny armies or single heroes to take lightly defended cities while you rush on to the capital.

Conquest is so easy on the normal and slightly higher difficult levels, in fact, that the diplomacy seems pretty pointless. Dynastic marriages should lead to drama, but when you look at your family tree and see that your 31 year old king has a 26 year old son, you can pretty much rule out a succession crisis in the immediate future. So much of Elemental feels like broken promise after broken promise.

Even a broken promise is still a promise. Elemental is clearly a game that had too many ideas and too much love – there is a core game with an evolving world full of adventure here. The world isn't that interesting, but interesting things could happen here. Quests of great promise that force you to negotiate passage into enemy lands, for example; this can happen, but the rewards are never worth the risk. A greater incentive to police your lands to keep brigands and robbers out; Stardock's Galactic Civilizations 2 has a morale meter that would fit well in a situation like this. Given Stardock's history and the many brilliant ideas here, there is every indication that by year's end this will be a strategy game worth looking at.

But we can only look at what we have now. Elemental is now undercooked with no incentive to keep sitting down to dinner. With more variety and more clarity, Stardock's fantasy world might tell stories you would tell your friends. It's a shame it insisted on trying to tell them now.

Troy Goodfellow is a regular contributor to GameShark and many other sites. He is strategy columnist for PCGamer magazine, blogs regularly at Flash of Steel where he hosts a strategy game themed podcast, Three Moves Ahead .

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