Elemental: War of Magic is a turn based strategy title launched by Stardock that combines tactical battles that are somewhat similar to those of the Heroes of Might and Magic series with a complex strategy layer that combines city building, technology research, powerful spells and diplomatic interactions with other empires.

I've had a soft spot for Stardock ever since they put out the original Galactic Civilizations II and my respect for the company only increased as they put out the two expansions for that game and when they published Ironclad's Sins of a Solar Empire.

Now the company released Elemental and the game promised to do for fantasy settings what Galactic Civilizations has done for 4X space turn based strategy, with a variety of customization options for the player civilization and complex development strategies.

Elemental: War of Magic is complex but, unfortunately, the game is also far from reaching its potential at the moment.

I've played for about two days using the 1.06 patch and there's a clear sense of what the engine and the setup can do but there are a lot of small things that limit my enjoyment.

For one equipment seems to be weird, with values and costs that seems at times to be randomly allocated rather than balanced to make sure that players can actually built units that have a lot of armor.

Spells are also poorly balanced, with some of them so good I seem to use them every turn and others having weird limitations.

The world is beautiful and interesting to explore and I love the fact that how much adventuring any character can do is actually limited by his scientific knowledge of the world.

But the fact that locations cannot be accessed until you reach a certain level although they are on the world map seems too limiting, especially for the player coming from Heroes of Might and Magic and its balancing system where tougher creatures guarded the most important locations.

Elemental can still be a very good game, especially given how open it all is to player made content, but Stardock needs to put a few patches in, with the biggest one set to hit in the middle of September.