Fallen Enchantress Review from Pixel Perfect Gaming

Nice to have a review like that, but it's not exactly of actual value.

The graphics are not bad, but you have to strain it really bad to give it 4 out of 5. 5 out of 5 is just plain silly.

It's OK if they like the game and you don't.   It's just a matter of opinion.  Everyone has a right to their own perspective.

this guy has no idea what's going on.

Lots of cliches, little evidence (to me) of any real deep play or understanding that went into the review.  That's irrespective of his views on the game per se.

Never said I don't like it.

But what is a review worth (aside from the obvious advertisement) if the standart is so low?

To break it up for you:

Graphics are nice to look at. 3.5 stars out of 5. Another half star if immersion breakers like silly fences around settlements and the road graphics get an overhaul. 5 out of 5 is drop dead gorgeous. And that is something this game won't achieve ever. The Human Units have a tendency to look like they got a slight form of trisomy 21 and mountains are more of a bump in the landscape.

The graphics work and mostly don't take away from the game, good enough, but not maximum score.

I dunno, to some extent it depends on how much you like the stylization they did. I am actually a real big fan, I like the way the game looks like a watercolour painting. I don't know why that appeals to me so much but it really does. The graphics are not high poly/texture and so if photorealism is the thing that you like they aren't great, but if you are in to the particular stylization they chose, then they are quite cool.

I'm certainly not going to claim that my opinion is universal, just saying I can see why someone would rate the graphics highly, despite them being objectively lower end.

I find the graphics incredible! Very exciting in the early game to find yourself alone in a huge world surrounded by magic and monsters. The camera and resulting views are what give the game much of it's beauty in being able to afford various vistas of the realm.

I don't consider it or any game "perfect", but I would still offer 5 stars. It's going to be interesting to see where Stardock goes with Elemental over the months and years...

Graphics are fine imo.  I am sure this reviewer played one game and did not even finish it.  I would have given 5 out of 5 after my first 10 hour play session, but as you play more, you notice the balance and AI issues.

Agreed. This review seems a little dubious. Either A) he didn't really play this game all that long before he "reviewed" it, B ) he didn't actually play it and reviewed it based on videos or description or C) someone paid him to say/do this. 

I hate to sound paranoid, but I just don't buy it. A "perfect" score? Suurrrrrrrrrrre.

I'm more surprised he gave 5/5 to the sound. Both music and effects are extremely generic.

I suspect he wanted to give the whole game 5/5 and to achieve that had to give 5/5 in all categories.

The thing is, there are some seriously low reviews for the same exact reason (not enough play time.) These are the reviews crying, it's too hard, there is no depth, blah, blah.

It does not appear to count as a legitimate Metacritic review so my prediction of sub-80 is still perfectly intact. 

I wonder why no reviewer so far (and I read them all before I decided to buy the game) mentioned how buggy the game is. In fact it is the buggiest game I have ever played. From the game engine to the user interface, from trivial data structures like lists and queues over basic functionality like saving a game to more advanced problems like connectivity checking and pathfinding, no (technical) part really works as it should.

The artwork is quite good IMO (probably not 5/5 though) and the gameplay really exciting. Let's hope that one day the game will live up to the expectations. Right now it is still not more than a showcase (AKA beta version) of how it could look like at some point in the future.

Concerning the review: Some sentences are taken verbatim from the game description and some explanations are plain wrong.

Broadly speaking I agree (although it isn't the buggiest game I have played, just too buggy).

I've said this quite a few times, FE needed/needs much more polishing and bug fixing before it is anywhere near its true potential. However it appears Stardock, or at least Frogboy, disagree on the degree of the problem, based on several comments from them and the fact they released FE at a point which I think was way too early.

+1.

My mark is 4.5 stars out of 5.

I don't think it is fair to say the reviewer is using cliché and have not tested the game in depth. Look at his screenshots, some show quite advanced games, with companies and high end units, sprawling empires.

I bet you can find them all on the net. (Funny to imagine that someone would rather spend his/her time with Google than play the game.) I'll go with DevildogFF (reply #10) and others.

@Mistwraithe: You certainly played more different games than I did. Poor fellow. I won't ask you about them...

And progress is painfully slow at this point.  I am wondering if Stardock feels they do not owe anyone a perfect game as quickly as possible because they gave it away to so many people.  The problem is that many of us did pay for the game and it is not nearly as finished as I had hoped when I bought it.  I didn't even get it on sale as I really wanted a game like this.  =(

OOOOHHHHH ...

I was fooled. I spoke of advanced screenshots as proof he played a long time, but then, look at the screenshots of the FE official page

https://www.elementalgame.com/fallen-enchantress

they are the ones the reviewer used!

Shame on him

My theory is that at least the core team around Derek Paxton has a perfectly clear picture of the (lack of) quality. That's because they read customer complaints and play the game themselves.

I guess that developers are assigned to the team only if they have no more "serious" work to do. (This shuffling of developers is a common cause for messy code.) And right now hardly anybody is available. They probably hope to gain some time. It's not that Stardock doesn't care for their customers, only gamers are the least important among them.

And, of course, Frogboy was lying when he said that they made the game as good as they possible could. (At least I hope he was.)

I don't feel like it is that slow right now.

I've seen work on the AI, tweaking it pretty nice from what I have seen so far plus the last patch is just about 20 days old. I don't think that is too slow. Wait at least a month before you start ranting about slow progress and take the inofficial patches if waiting is too hard

And if I remember right, there are plans for a first addon focused on heroes.

I just hope this game will follow the same strategy as the other Stardock titles I have seen. Namely Galciv and Sins of a solar empire.

Both started with a pretty solid/good game and brought it to awesome with the patches and addons that followed.

I see something of the same here.

The game has bugs, but the parts of the game work well together and are pretty solid and fun to play with right now. Another three addons, one for heroes, one for the strategy and cities and one for the combat and this game will be a shining gem, on par and maybe beyond the old master MOM.

Since no company would take the risk to run a public forum unattended and this "It's not really as bad as that and we have so many exciting things in store for you." sounds like the typical reaction from the marketing department and the plans have not yet been publicly announced AFAIK, you must have heard about them during an internal meeting at Stardock. Can you provide some more details please?

Thanks for putting me in a marketing department, but no, I just observed how they managed their games in the past.

As for further information:

The experimental .exe from frogboy can be found on the forum and as for the addon... now you mention it, I'm not exactly sure where I read about this. Can't find it right now, but I keep looking.

I just hope I havn't seen it in some mods description and mixed the whole thing up....

It has taken a bit longer than I expected for them to tidy up the bugs. I suspect this is partly because they reduced team size and partly because they don't see the bugs as being as much of a priority as I do (Stardock are starting to focus on downloads/expansions etc, I think the core game is still too buggy to devote much time to that, unless they wanted to go the "paid expansion which fixes all the bugs" route which doesn't seem their mindset).

One factor is likely to be sales. I think they were hoping for a sleeper hit and haven't got it (yet). Certainly they seemed confident the game was ready to release at a point when I was saying it would only get 75ish Metacritic scores (it now has 77, I was close) and at one point Frogboy said FE was the most polished game they have produced... so still a bit of blinkered vision about their game IMO (although not nearly as bad as it was with WoM! at least!)

BUT, on the positive side I think FE does have the potential to be a sleeper hit, they just need to polish it up to A-game level. Hopefully Stardock will stick with it enough to do just that.

v1.12 was released just a couple weeks ago.  

Version 1.2 is in development.  We don't plan to put out more than 1 update per month (though we did put out 2 updates in December but that's the exception).

We are listening to your suggestions and requests and add them to the list.