I, personally, think reviewers should way to do an actual review a day or so after the street date release. It is common for companies to have one version on disk and release a comprehensive patch upon release that "fixes" problems. This trend was started to deter pirates and get more fine tuning turing the time when the game was at the printers. To do a comprehensive review of a game that hasn't officially released yet is just underhanded and inconsiderate.

Now the exception would be if Stardock indeed released copies for the purpose of being reviewed. Then they'd only have themselves to blame. But the point remains that reviews of games should not take into account anything before release.

An example was Gamespot review of Demigod. The review was posted before the street date indicating that multiplayer was broken and things like that. Gee, ya think that a game that hadn't officially been released yet would have broken multiplayer? Had they done the same review 2 days later after the game had been released, I wouldn't have had a problem. I mean multiplayer was broken for a considerable amount of time after release as well (though vastly improved from the initial broken street date release of the game). Now the multiplayer generally works quite well and the game is quite good.

Perhaps reviews need to be revised over time. Doing a yearly recap on games would be a better indicator of how a game actually is. Most reviews are made in a day or two of actually playing a game. They are generally artifically high or low due to novelty or bugs (respectively). Once that wears off and things are fixed, the game will be different.

I know almost nothing about Elemental. I preordered only this week (and I rarely pay full price for a game, let alone preorder) because it's stardock and, quite frankly, stardock does not make a bad game. I'll reserve my judgement of the game once I'm able to play it. I will review it based on how it plays over the first few days including once multiplayer is operational. There is just no point in reviewing things that haven't been given the chance to be fully operational. Now if things are still broken in a week, then thats a good indication of where the game is upon release. I guess we shall see soon enough

Here's to hoping we, who preordered this past week, will be able to get the game today I am anxious to try it out after all I've heard.

For a second there I thought you were talking about Yahtzee...

In my experience, most of the games uses additive percentages, and most of the game specifically say so.

This game uses compound percent, and does not mention it (well may be it will say so in the manual), so I would not blame reviewer for missing it. A good game should be clear about it. A good fix would be when it shows bonuses (on second screen) it should mention it somehow.

Now the problems with the game as I see are the following in this example:

1) 50% bonus instead of 10%

2) Applying bonus twice on the second screenshot: 5*1.25*1.25*1.5*1.5 = 17.578125=17.6

3) Does not provide clear explanations (compound vs additive) and together with above problems confuses player completely.

I do understand precisely what and why the reviewer said what he said. Half the time I was playing beta 4 I felt completely loss because I just could not understand why things happen the way they are and thus could not predict which way is better. And this is UBER important for STRATEGY game, otherwise it is not a strategy game but a guessing game.

Knowing that release to manufacture (RTM) version was produced around the time of beta 4, the state of RTM version does not surprise me.

Unfortunately SD choice to rush the game, despite many of beta testers asking to delay it, means that the game will get bad reviews and will not have good sales as it could have been, and it does mean smaller community and even smaller motivation of SD to continue work on this game.

And yeah, it looks like those who were saying that "release version is miles ahead than beta 4" were wrong, or at least not right enough to make release version be good enough for reviewers to have good impressions. (I am having "I told you so" moment)

I disagree, most people do not check the numbers each time, that's true, but most people RELY on the game to do math correctly. If you think your bonus is 10% it SHOULD be 10% not 50%.

No, he was playing with release version. He even mentioned that he expect day 0 patch, but the version he plays IS release.

This is completely off topic.  It isn't a place to express your angst, there are plenty of other threads for that.  I rather thought the point was a centralized location for all reviews about the game.

Tom Chick has posted the second entry in his Elemental diary:

http://fidgit.com/archives/2010/08/elemental_flesh_and_steel.php

For my first real game of Elemental, I had a plan. I had already dinked around in two or three tentative games, which were mostly spent trying to figure out Elemental, since the game itself isn't terribly helpful on that front. But now I had a plan. I would boom my population up, focusing primarily on technology to spread out and grow a handful of cities. I would begin with an emphasis on Civilization/Imperium research to build up a solid infrastructure of money, materials, and population. Then I would layer in some Warfare/Conquest research to develop a big army with my developed infrastructure. Then I would hit my Adventure/Domination research to discover new challenges, which I would handily meet with my big army. Magic? Forget it. Who needs it? I'd save that for another game. This game would be about flesh and steel.

continued at link

As has been mentioned numerous times already, this thread was supposed to be about reviews and has become a math lesson. I spent quite a while doing what the OP suggested he'd do and scouring the internet for reviews. Finding none except the math criticism lambasted above and its follow-up, I've decided to write my own brief review for your reading and/or trolling pleasure.

I have to start by telling you a little bit about (I promise, just a little bit) about me. I'm an avid gamer and have been for many years. I grew up on King's Quest and playing Sim City on a commodore 64. Last sentence about me: I played Master of Magic to death and loved nearly everything about it (kudos on the Sss'ra avatar killer105).

Onto my experience with Elemental and my review. Elemental was introduced to me as a sort of meta-sequel coming out of the aether of the long dead, greatly missed MoM. As such, I pre-ordered it immediately upon hearing about it last September. I tried to play in the early stages of the beta but for various reasons (lack of a game, for instance) gave up on that pretty quickly. I picked it back up in beta 4 with particularly renewed vigor in the few days leading up to release. I was immediately amazed by the lack of... well, pretty much anything that worked right. I chalked it up to beta stage (albeit beta stage within 96 hours of release) and pressed on through the bugs and quirks, trying to learn enough about the game mechanics to hit the ground running on my day early download of the full version.

Fast forward to the full version. I was again amazed at how high fidelity the conceptual copy of MoM was - right down to the terrible post-production bugs (you remember those, right?). A wave of nostalgia washed over me as not 30 seconds into game play alt-Tab caused it to crash down around me - just like the wraiths and shadow demons used to do! Quickly I realized, however, that the bugs and quirks were not confined to the few ruins and temples that contained monsters who played corrupted sound files - they were everywhere. Everything from buildings landing in the wrong slot due to the camera recentering during the click to place them to wonky recognition of which square or unit the cursor is pointing to in battle to event notifications stumbling over one another in their frenzy to let you know what happened to, yes, weird math with unexplained numbers. In several cases, stated bonuses on buildings or techs or units had either no effect (for instance heroes with the royalty ability (cities get +1 prestige)) the wrong effect (the school building is supposed to increase tech knowledge by 15% according to the description in the notes, economy by 15% according to the tooltip, and seems to do neither on the city summary screen) or something else entirely.

Ok, so maybe these quirks can be looked over. MoM, after all, did have problems beyond high level death magic units. So let's look at an area in which Elemental seems to offer an improvement over its unofficial predecessor: it has a campaign! During the beta, I had no idea there would be a campaign (this is admittedly my second visit to this forum, the first being to learn when I could begin my (albeit misused) beta testing) so when I loaded up the full version the first time I was beyond excited. The excitement was slightly dampened when the intro 'movie' consisted of a voice over stills being panned or zoomed, but even that I can forgive - onto the campaign!

I found my character beached after a shipwreck with dire news to share with the sovereigns of mankind. Immediately I was confronted by another survivor who joined my party. Then a farmer who gave me the power to form my capital - fantastic! The other companion suggested what I was already thinking, that the nearby open space between the farmable fertile land and the gold mine would be a fantastic place to build. And it was all downhill from there. During the course of the campaign (as much of it was included in the release package anyway) you could not build any buildings other than the workshop (to provide building materials) and huts (for population). Further, you could not research any tech, nor any magic. For me, anyway, advancing through the various tech trees and spell books is one of the joys of 4x type strategy games. The complete absence of the ability to do so in the campaign was mind-boggling. As you progressed through the poorly written storyline, you were offered scant bits of tech and a handful of spells, enough to train some new units and amuse yourself with a little fire. If I'm recalling correctly, the spells came in three installments and the unit tech (which included various armaments, the ability to train multiple units at once, and to train 'experienced' units) came in two. I made something like 3-4 groups of the toughest guys I could - and with them, was able to stamp out the rest of the campaign. All 2 hours of it (well, 2 hours less the time previous to their training - so we're talking maybe ~45 minutes with the new bad lads). At the end of the campaign I felt I'd accomplished virtually nothing, that the storyline (...) hadn't really advanced, and that my uncompelling protagonist was sorely in need of something more. ANYTHING more. 

However, at the same time, as may be totally obvious by now, I didn't want any more. The game felt so wretched while being played that I was looking at it as a trial of my endurance. I had so much hope for this game and I feel all kinds of let down. While the graphics are very attractive, just about every other aspect of the game lacks anything worth having in a game. This thread is ripe with 'there will be a patch' type defenses of Stardock's endeavor - and in fact there was a patch. What it fixed, I have no idea, although it seems to have added a launcher with a button to search for additional patches (which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me since you have to play through impulse, which does that already, but..whatever) and now alt-Tab only sometimes causes a fatal error. Unfortunately for all, the flaws in this puppy go way deeper than any amount of patching is going to fix. Sure some things will be improved, like information inconsistencies between different sources within the game or the length of the campaign (they ARE going to add more, right?) but neither of those things nor anything else that hasn't been already rolled into the project by now is likely to save it.

I guess it's a good thing dos-box is around along with a good MoM port. Seems like someone even fixed some of the bugs.

The PC Gamer review is very blunt, and it seems a little "emotional", as if the reviewer had some sort of axe to grind with Brad. Seems more like blog material than a professional take on the game.

He does raise valid points, though. I have full faith in Stardock that the next months will see a lot of updates and patches, and the game will eventually shine. But I also agree that what I downloaded yesterday, and with the patch today, doesn't seem finished. Do I regret my purchase? No, I'd have bought it anyway. Maybe a few months later, but then again, they have the money now and perhaps that will fuel the continued development.

I think the only concern I have is that the reviews will be mostly negative and the ratings the game gets now in its present release state will still be what people look at when they consider the purchase of the game in half a year or in two years, even though the game will be a totally different one.

The PC Gamer "review" did not seem overly acerbic to me. The writer even said he would not review the game until it was playable. He voiced what appeared to me to be reasonable opinions and arguments. I also tend to feel that many things went wrong here, and one of them was an over-abundance of fanboyism on the part of the community here.

From the PC Gamer review comments, people are more upset by the QT3 post than by problems with the product.  Tom doesn't really sound biased, but I think he needs to fill in some of the details (e.g. link to forum posts about why MP is disabled and for how long).  It's too bad that his rig is having so many conflicts with the game.  I personally haven't seen a white screen (or had nearly as many crashes as he describes).

http://www.gamersbillofrights.com/

It's always been there.

From https://forums.elementalgame.com/392474:

With regards to a post on Rock Paper Shot Gun, which picked up the PC Gamer UK story, they erroneously point to a 2+ year old URL to a Stardock news item that is no longer active (we switched news systems a year or so ago). Their article falsely implies that we have stepped away from our commitment to the Gamer’s Bill of Rights.

Yeah, Tom will be doing a review on Friday, I will post that link once he gets it on his site.  I'll include sublinks to his diary entries.