Elemental: War of Magic Impressions

While not a full review, the editors at Shacknews have shared their impressions of Elemental: War of Magic after spending a few days with Stardock's strategy/RPG crossbreed. Unfortunately, their general tone is very similar to what we've taken away from other recent articles:
When leveling up, players can only choose a single statistic to improve, placing the Sovereign on the path to obsolescence. Feature creep particularly appears to be at work here. The developers might feel that building these characters in an in-depth RPG-like setting, focusing on single statistics, is a great feature and adds depth. Instead, it just serves to add dubious player choice. Why not just have the sovereign level-up every stat and maintain its power level with regular units as the game progresses?

The game's battle system is similarly convoluted by features. The game offers full, turn-based tactical combat, but most units do not have any abilities to use besides the standard attack. As I mentioned, magic is underwhelming in combat and these drawn-out battles usually amount to moving forward and repeatedly attacking and taking counterattacks. Auto-resolving battles, in most cases, is generally the best course of action. However, auto-resolving actually plays out a full tactical battle. This means that a battle AI had to be created to use spells and what few abilities there are in the game. It all seems needless when attack and defense numbers get so inflated by the mid- to late-game, that no amount of tactics will change the outcome if you're simply outclassed.