Elemental: Reforged

I've put a ton of time into this game, and really quite love it, despite crashing many times and freezing and many issues...but only when heavily modded. Because god it is slow. It is legitimately the slowest 4X I have ever played, even on the fastest setting. But the reason I can't recommend it is the devs, and the community they create. The forums and discord are a cesspit of sycophants. Give suggestions on how to make the game more enjoyable for the sort of players who would like faster gameplay (like making the fastest setting not incredibly slow still), they will start insulting you. Point out a bug that allows your trade partners and non-agg pact factions to steal your outposts? They tell you essentially "learn to play"...when stealing resources is literally the exact opposite of non-aggression. I regret buying the DLC. Especially as almost all of the DLC data is actually in the base game files so you can literally just copy it, make your own mod and run it (as long as it isn't on steam) and have access to most of it. Which is beyond scummy. This just guaranteed I won't buy anything Stardock ever again. Edit: developer responded saying they have not seen any of this behavior. The same dev that said to another reviewer "as someone else said to you, get a life". Yeah man, this isn't it.

I have all the games in the series. This is supposed to be one Elemental to rule them all. It is not. It just a box with all the old and broken games thrown in and shaken a bit. I do not know what is happening with Stardock. It feels it is run by AI or raccoons, maybe racoons prompting AI. I can see them trying, but they just do not know how humans work, and so the result is is a pile of unfinished systems that do not integrate or balance with each other, and after so many years, I do not believe this ever will change. It just makes me sad.

** Don't let you fool by the dev comment below. A damage reduction attempt because the reviews went haywire. They speak volumes. Dev tries to play a strawman on this review by picking a balancing topic and trying to "rule out" the imbalance and bug feast they have fabricated with that one fish alone. Review limit disallows me to put in words gently how stupid that one topic was. Note: Some of the "nice" users, had their "nice" comments removed. They keep the game bad and alive and made initial review look better. The dev decided to make a snowflake move and ban me in the forums, after I stopped posting there for a while. Banning for a review. Insulting me in the "reason" section. Has his emotions not under control and tells me to get a life (removed it) ** While reading it, remember, 1 DLC out after release. Context: This game is being developed over around 16 years and has been sold as a finished game 3(+1) times under different names. - Elemental: War of Magic - Elemental: Fallen Enchantress - Elemental: Sorcerer King** **spin-of that tried to refine the failures from previous one, this one failed hard - Elemental Reforged (feeds from the previous 3 games) They fixed: visual glitches and slow-downs that began after playing the game longer. They forced you to restart the game regularly to make it run smoothly again or make the glitches disappear. Not needed anymore. They haven broken: almost *everything* down to every single tooltip. Balancing became worse. You blindly skill into a spells: They did not manage to add mana cost information to this day over the course of all the game versions. You skill and find out that doing 8 damage costs 100 mana, which is crazy expensive. But you can skill it early at level 4. You won't kill anything with it. There are spells that arbitrary do less damage (with not other side-effects) and cost more, than other spells. There are spells that simply make no sense. They don't want to implement certain changes to solve certain balance issues, so they will instead debate that a brick should be round and not rectangular, wasting your time. For example there are a couple of spells that increase damage proportional to your level, but the cost is instantly high & fixed. They'd have to add a feature to the game engine to scale the cost dynamically with your level as well. But they won't tell you that, instead they will debate that the spell is strong *later* ignoring, I never asked to make it stronger, just also useful *early* since you can skill it at level 4. As said, its like talking about whether a brick should be round or rectangular. Why should a spell do 8 damage (does not kill anything) and cost 100 mana? (crazy much for the first ~50-100 rounds). Tooltips were broken in previous bug-riddled game. They did not manage to fix them. But they have managed to break the rest of them. They did not add *useful* tooltips to skills though. An example would be to show how much resource an active skill costs before skilling it. Which is important, as should be clear from abowe balancing issue example. Some details on tooltips of buildings don't even show certain information anymore, you have to read the description and then compare stat changes in details. The game has almost *all* aspects broken that require some sort of re-calculation. For example you buff your city with a spell that's based on a resouce "radiance" and your city get one extra "radiance" later: You have to remove that or those spells and cast them again for the effect to update. Often game fails to calculate correctly. I have 0 unrest, but the city incomes are reduced by an imaginary unrest that doesn't exist. Persistent through game reloads or turns passing. Everything is thoroughly bugged down to incorrect displayed information, calculation and tooltip. You skill abilities, that increase critical hit chance or damage and then you check the sum and it does not add up at all, no matter *how* you try to calculate it and what ideads of possible calculations you put into it. I should have 80% crit chance with end-game hero skill and equipment, but tooltip shows 50% (thats not a hard cap). Some enemies get roughly crit every 2. hit, some get only once every 20 hits *consistently*. Without having any anti-crit abilities. Over and over again, not just random chance. An enemy has 58 attack (roughly = damage done) and an ability that does fire damage equal to its attack (~58). I have 20% fire resistence and constantly receive 77-88 damage. Enemy has NO elemental or magic damage bonus and no so called "swarm" bonus from surrounding me with its allies. I debuff -4 atackt on enemy. Now makes consistently 81-92 damage (more, not less). You never know, is tooltip wrong, is tooltip correct, ability buggy, is item buggy or its tooltip description? With one ability its even crazier, there are 3 numbers. Tooltip on the skill shows for example 29 damage, when targeting enemy tooltip tells enemy will receive 39 damage, at the end enemy receives 13 damage. Even reloading doesn't properly work. It does cancel certain actions that the AI did before reloading. Certain *states* in the game are not correctly reset or are reset: You end your turn, auto-save triggers not at the end of the turn, but the beginning of the next turn. However also before AI monsters move around and attack. This monsters might attack you or your cities. However, when you reload, they suddenly don't. Many skills are bugged and don't benefit from bonuses, but tooltips will show you the bonuses applied. As in previous titles, the game still can't properly show how far your army will move. It shows *green* path to where you supposedly can move them, the army starts moving, stops earlier than previously shown as reachable and the path becomes *yellow* (=out of movement points). There are other issues that amplify this issue (which btw is common in the game). When your army stopped *before* reaching the destination, next turn the game won't cycle to the army "because it has still some way to go automatically". But the army will just walk 1 out of its 3 movement points and you won't be notified that the army has movement points left, like in any other *normal* game, instead the turn will just end with 2 movement points unused. Another example of issue with this: If you had such a long movement path set, ended your turn, then an enemy army was spotted, you would maybe want to move your army other way. But some other issue forced you to reload the game. After reloading ALL your armies will instantly execute their movements. Now your option to cancel the movement has been taken by the game. How much non-sense can you add to one single feature? Stardock: YES. You have to be very cautious in the game to not accidentally use this "feature" of laying a long path, for your armies because it triggers all sort of issues I just barely outlined here. I have to cycle cautiously through all my armies before ending turn to ensure to never have any longer path set, because it causes so much troubles. LIke with the movement example, the devs have managed to develop issue-synergies. One issue works flawlessly with others to amplify annoyance. Imagine one simple feature with 5 bugs and 10 synergies with other issues? A masterwork not everyone is capable to achieve. But if you just dump one game after another without ever completing them, you craft exactly that masterwork. Often what they did felt like "recycle as cheap as possible, don't change anything to reflect it in the UI": There are invisible equipment slots, I figured out they exist only by accidentally equiping from inventory clicking the item... You could in older game see your resistences against fire and other damage types. Now you can't, because they moved things around and there was apparently no space, so they decided thats an investment to much. I've probably managed to give an insight on about 1% of the bugs this game contains...

I really liked Fallen Enchantress Legendary Heroes, but it had a lot of issues that they never fixed. I was hoping that this one would be better, but its looking like it is not. After awhile the game crashes every 7 to 10 turns, mostly at the end of the turn. There is an NPC in my current game that has a score/ranking of 20k but only has 10 cities that are all smaller than mine and it looks like its score goes up several hundred each turn and as far as I can tell there tech is behind mine. So who knows whats going on there. When the game crashes less than 1/2 the time you can send a bug report. It looks like there are other issues with how things are calculated but maybe I just do not understand what they mean by +50% to wealth when you are producing it and the number goes from 20 to 23. There are many times when you cast say fireball on the enemy and you see the numbers showing the damage that you did and then you see the fireball sail across the map and the graphic of it exploding. The only new feature that they added that annoys me is they added a new resource you have to spend to create cities and you only start with 10 and you have to also use it to bring one of your kids in the family line out as a hero. If I could get a refund I would.

Most anemic "Fantasy" 4X game I've ever played. Even Old World, a strictly historical game, has way more unit variety and diversity than this game does. I think this was supposed to be a successor to MoM, at least in its first inception way back when. I don't see it. MoM oozes with magic and mystique. This game is even more mundane than Civilizations. I feel nothing for the setting or atmosphere in this game. The DLC added potions that can turn your units into dragons or other more fantastical creatures, but this lasts for only a single battle. Game balance is wack. Most skills and spells you can get for your heroes are junk and weaker than the default attacks. Bows and staffs are pretty bad since they nerf your initiative by a lot and don't do a whole lot of damage to compensate. They can be usable at the end game when you can really buff your army's initiative with a hero, but otherwise you're better off just making stacks of melee combatants who will pick off enemies with a single attack while being massive tanks themselves. Did I mention that the most fantastic race you can play in this game are humans with horns? Kind of like the Star Wars Zabraks. I need more different cultures and civilizations out of my fantasy games with a better balanced and diverse cast of units.

I really wanted to like this, having played the other games in the series. However, for what is intended to be the ultimate version of Elemental, it has completely unacceptable bugs for a game released in 2026, and many are incredibly basic issues. For a very simple example: Loading an autosave will result in any units that are trained that turn to disappear. There is no focus on game balance at all, with the logic being "this is a single player game, so game balance isn't necessary - the focus is on FUN!". Well, a game so lacking in balance is not fun. Wandering mobs are often ridiculously powerful compared to your party (especially early game), and it is sheer RNG whether they decide to attack your cities, or just... wander around pointlessly until you get strong enough to kill them.

Disappointing. The basic idea is great, the detailed city and character development appeals to me, and I really like the mixture of 4X and RPG. Aesthetics are fine by me. However, I do not see this as a game ready to be played by a normal player. Many important things are unexplained (dynasty/marriage/children. sovereign essence, stamina, unrest, much of the significance of shards, the list goes on and on. The tutorial is little help, and the in-game help is not only woefully incomplete, but it is also not searchable. Key things are just plain wrong -- one faction's special ability is Rush, which is labeled as doing one thing, but actually does something else. All that aside, in my attempted games, there have always been spawns near my starting city that sent out wanderers well beyond anything even my sovereign could reasonably handle early in the game. They head straight for the city and wipe it out in one turn. If you beeline excellent magic, you can defeat the first one or two, but there's a limit to how much mana you could have at that point. And besides, it kind of wrecks the game to have to keep your sovereign close to home to avoid instant game over. I honestly don't know whether this is an accidental imbalance they aim to fix, or whether they calibrated the game based on an elite group that had been following the development all along and want a game that is still challenging even after sharing exploits with each other. (That is a trend, unfortunately.) Personally, I am looking for a game that I can pick up, learn at low difficulty, and then become good enough to play at higher difficulties, all without reading up on the internet for the inside scoop. At this point, this isn't all that close to being that game.

would be a great game if it did not crash all the time

I LOVE the original game, and this one too. However, there are far too many bugs in the game and for $30 it hasn't been worth it. *Edit - Played more of the game (30 hours more) while it still has bugs, got involved in the Discord and finding the devs very involved. Changing the review as I have high hopes for the future of this game.