RockPaperShotgun article: Impressions: Elemental – Fallen Enchantress Beta

Pretty spot on.  The game has a bunch of fascinating parts, that onto themselves work well, but it hasn't coalesced into single good game experience yet.  Cities and armies have to be more meaningful.  One idea is I think cities should be un-razable, right now the easiest way to win is simply destroy everything.  Almost the exact opposite of the purpose of the game, to repopulate and re-civilize a damaged world.  Right now, soldiers are useless against anything but other soldiers.  You can't create enough cities, that each can't create enough troops or resources quick enough to make armies anything other than a waste of time.  Heroes are quickly powerful, armies can't defend anything, cities take hundreds of turns to be meaningful, and are undefendable, thus the best strategy is simply rolling with powerful heroes and razing all cities. What do I need from the cities?  Gold?  Nope, don't make armies earn better gear from wandering around.  Resources?  Nope, no need for  those if I don't have armies.  Mana?  Don't need to use many spells, can do without.  

It does feel like you are playing two games at once, and they tend to get in each others way.  The RPG and the city bulding.  Cities need to be far more important.  They need to be far more powerful, far less fragile.  Armies need to be a threat and in greater numbers.  Even if a great hero could take on any single army unit in the game, several should always be a threat, and he should not be able to engage everything the other nation can through at him.  Yes, the sov can beat this army, but can he beat the other five I have on the map, wack-a-mole.  Immortal sovs and heroes make this difficult too.  The game needs more cities and more armies.  And we need to take out abilities that decimate units in one hit.  

Imho, RPS usually knows what they're talking about. It's the only review site I read nowadays. You can usually tell from their reviews that they are 1) real, actual gamers (not just pretending) and 2) that they actually played the game and hold it up for its own scrutiny without overbearing comparisons to other games. That is to say that just because another game in the genre had one fun mechanic doesn't mean the next game has to have the same fun mechanic or "suck" because of that.

They seem to be picking at what many people on these forums have picked at - OP heroes. I think if (melee) heroes are toned down, the other elements of the game will appear more important. Of course the game feels like the different parts don't quite connect if you can win the game without building a city.

Review was good, but was annoyed by the comments, all people could talk about was the sexual harassment lawsuit.

They didn't just comment on heroes being overpowered they also mentioned that late game becomes broing because all the quests and monsters disappear really really quickly leaving a empty world.