09.14
style
Sovereign. After selecting what nation and Sovereign you want to use (or creating your own complete with backstory), you then use a series of options to select the size of the world, the length of the game, who you'll be facing, and the victory conditions you want to play with.
In the game you use your Sovereign to build up a series of cities and forge an empire, competing with other Sovereigns for valuable resources on the map. That makes it sound pretty simple, but trust me, it's not. It's easy to get overwhelmed when you're not only managing the resources of your empire, but also worrying about the income and construction going on in each of your cities on a turn-to-turn basis. Stack on this the constant choices you're making about the research your country is performing – focusing on either military, politics, infrastructure or magic, which in turn will affect the entire way you play the game since research determines the things you can build – and the head that's wearing the crown starts to feel heavy indeed. The ultimate goal of this complicated empire building? To unite the land through conquest, diplomacy, questing, or uniting all the magical shards in the world.
Like Civilization, the primary focus of Elemental is not playing through a story-driven campaign, but is instead more about creating a world out of a series of options and seeing how it works out. Sure, Elemental has a short campaign mode that follows a story, but the tale itself is pretty mundane, and it doesn't even work all that well as the tutorial it's so obviously meant to be. You can learn some very basic ideas behind the game through playing this guided version of the game, but even by the time I finished the it – even after reading all the in game tool tips and guides that are available – I still felt like I didn't have a very good understanding of how any of the more complex mechanics in Elemental worked. Even now, after many single player battles outside of the campaign (the primary way you'll play Elemental), I still find that I learn more about the game by talking about it with other people who are playing than I ever do through any of the in-game help that's available. It's a significant problem, and one that Stardock is aware of, as they've informed me that they're working on a full-blown tutorial right now.
If, like me, you're willing to put the time into learning the more complex parts of Elemental on your own, then you might enjoy some of what it has to offer. Like other 4X games, Elemental is very addicting, and it's easy to start a game and then realize the sun is coming up because you've played through the night. And while most of the stability issues seem to be fixed now, I can understand a lot of the internet forum outrage that's occurred since the game launched in regards to its known technical issues. Repeatedly I lost my progress to a random crash, and in one case I even lost the ability to load up my prior saves because they were incompatible with the new version Stardock released.
Sadly, even when the game was working there are some issues with the A.I. that make it pretty frustrating to play against. The A.I. often takes its Sovereign into battle in foreign lands, making it easy to kill – which in turn eliminates the empire from the map. But should the enemy empires be smart enough to avoid this, they'll usually amass amazingly large armies and march on you, even if the victory through conquest option has been disabled. In all the matches I played I never once saw the A.I. try to win by any other way than wiping out the other nations, making it so I had to focus on my military to a point where I could never effectively pursue the other victory conditions.
The A.I. problem might be less of an issue if I could play against other players, but the multiplayer portion of the game still hasn't been activated. I would love to tell you all about how much fun it is, or talk about why this aspect of the game might make it a more appealing package overall, but sadly none of us have the option to engage in a part of the game that's advertised on the back of the box. I know that this is being delayed to fix issues and make sure it's the best experience possible, but at some point last week it became more than a little ridiculous that paying customers are still waiting for this.
Against A.I. (or, in theory, players) I'm not opposed to winning by conquest, I just wish that the other victory conditions felt more viable, and, more importantly, that playing out the battles was any fun. When you engage with an enemy force in Elemental you are given the option to auto-resolve the battle, or to engage in a turn-based battle where you can control each of your units individually . Going the latter route brings the player to a screen where they can see a battlefield that's divided into squares. Using their units' and characters' action points, each side takes turns maneuvering and fighting until one side is gone or routed from the field. The turn-based option is mildly interesting if you have a spell caster in the army – as casting can make a huge difference in the outcome – but generally this mode is extremely boring to play through. The only thing you really need to consider in combat is whether your army is bigger, and whether or not it has better armor and weapons. If it is, then you simply hit auto-resolve on every combat and move on to the much cooler empire building aspect of Elemental.
While the enemy A.I. and battle system are problematic, Elemental has some redeeming qualities that help me partially overlook its problems. Being able to customize your units – outfitting them with the weapons and armor you've researched, giving them mounts, and even editing their name and battle cry – is awesome. I'm a huge nerd, so I can really get into creating my own stories for my army. I also really enjoy the game's use of limited resources, forcing players to compete for things like mines, fertile soil, ancient libraries, and more, as this makes geographical location of cities much more important than it is in other 4X titles. Heck, even the look of the game is charming, as the hand-drawn looking world has an aesthetic that makes the game unique amongst what we're seeing releasing for the PC market as of late.
Closing Comments
In the end I have to admit that despite its large number of problems I find Elemental strangely engaging, and I want to keep playing just because I know that someday it's going to become a much better game than it is right now. It really is the damndest thing: even with the instability issues, even with its utter inaccessibility for newcomers to strategy games (and to a large extent, experienced players with anything less than an abundance of patience), I still want to make time to play Elemental. Is this some sort of Stockholm syndrome, I wonder? I doubt it. I think it's just that this is a game with some great ideas that just haven't been implemented as well as they could be. With Stardock's track record of post-release support I'd give it a month, and then you can play the game you should have gotten when they started asking for your money a couple of weeks ago.
by: Anthony Gallegos
Posted in: Strategy
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar