I have to say I love the game but this review is right. I am running the game on a pretty beefy rig and getting numerous crashes and slow downs. I expected a greater level of refinement from stardock as their last games were stable as anything. I mean Victoria II is more stable on my machine then this game without a patch which is crazy with paradox's track record. 

The launch had issues, no doubt. Many of those issues have been fixed or improved with last night/this morning's patch. To me, with the new patches, it's going very good.

It does seem that there is a definite bias from the gaming "press." Case in point, Empire: Total War. It was a buggy mess; far worse than ANY buggy mess I've ever played. Six months after release, the game still wouldn't load at all. And from the forums, a lot of people had these problems. Where was PC Gamer's warning then? In fact, what gaming mag/site gave any poor reviews to Empire at all? In fact, PC Gamer UK gave it 94. 94!!!!! For a game that couldn't run, at all, on some PCs; even those who could run it still had a broken mess. Yet, http://www.gamerankings.com/pc/942966-empire-total-war/index.html

At the same exact time, Demigod came out - a game with far fewer bugs, from an indie developer. Many of the reviews I read cited how much fun it was, but attributed low scores due to release week issues. http://www.gamerankings.com/pc/944424-demigod/index.html

It simply seems the "press" holds indie companies to MUCH higher standards than mainstream companies.

Today's Day-0 patched release runs great (for me). It feels a lot like GalCiv. It's not perfect; it has bugs. But it's certainly not worthy of the aforementioned post.

And as for "Ben," well, the customer is not always right. Sometimes the customer is a douchebag, and sometimes it's Ok to let the customer know that the customer is a douchebag and that said douchebag should *bleep* off.

But to be fair, the PC Game "press" is a joke, and has been for years. Holding them up to ANY manner of professionalism is to hold them to a standard far beyond their capacity. It just boggles my mind that so many reviewers, who are supposedly looking out for game buyers, praised Empire:TW so highly.

I agree with the article. Ive effectively shelled out $100 AU to buy into a beta game. The first patch fixed bits and pieces and allowed me to see the potential of the game. But the memory leak, the seeming after thoughts just drag this game through the mud.

I remember Master of Magic taking about 4 years to reach the stage it got too and becoming a classic, but that was over 15 years ago. That sort of crap should not happen now, especially when the template for the game is pretty much there concept wise. Sure, add some bells and whistles, tinker with it, put your slant on it, but for gods sake, make sure the thing is stable.

Hopefully Stardock is not going the way of all one shot big successes. Those that believe, because they got it right once, they can fling it out quicker with the next and still make capital off their reputation. It takes one lousey game to sink a company like Stardock, who are not big enough to absorb such losses.

However, I am still holding to the belief that I will see the spiritual successor to one of my favourite games of all time work and be the game it is meant to be.

Paradox games also take years, and in EUIII's case, 2 expansions to get to a good state.

People need to remember how hard games like this are to do right. 

The article is right. Game seems to have been rushed badly. Plenty of repeatable problems from people with fairly up to date systems. I have both the whited-out tactical battle screen and the CTD after 200 or so turns. Both still happen on 1.05.

I am very excited at the potential of the game, but I have not tried playing it since Monday; this was the first Stardock game I bought and I was underwhelmed by the experience.  It would have been a good idea if they plastered "Pre-release version" across the start up screen so everyone would know the state of the game they were downloading and would expect to find issues.

I think the PCGamer article is very fair considering the circumstances.  I was impressed that the writer said he was going to hold off reviewing until a stable version was available; he must really be a fan of Stardock because I have never seen that happen before and I have been reading computer game magazines for decades; since the days when they would print snippets of code in the magazine so you could write your own (mostly text-based) games.  The typical response of a reviewer is that they only review the release candidate, what people buy, not patched versions of games.

I have watched the game play video a couple of times now and I am (still) extremely anxious to play the game and especially to try out the mod tools.  However, I believe I will wait until the weekend before I try playing again; because I hope by the weekend they will have corrected most of the issues.  I think they will because I imagine the devs are updating code like crazy right now.  I hope the bad spelling and grammar I found in Monday's release has been fixed as well because, although it was unintentionally funny, it made me very sad inside... like a little part of my brain died.

"People need to remember how hard games like this are to do right. "

Then extend the sodding release date!? would you buy half a car?

Sorry but i am no longer willing to make up excuses because i am loyal to Stardock ... it's not like this is their FIRST ever game and it's not like there haven't been hundreds of complaint threads in previous forums before this .... IF i'd paid say ... 20-25 pounds for the game than yes, but when im payin CONCIDERABLY more for a DIGITAL title than i am for a BOXED copy (i live in the UK to clarify) then it had damn well justify the asking price and i am done being complacent, forgiving and making up reasons and excuses on thier behalf.

Now perhaps PC Gamer feel the same way? Ele is not the first SD title they have reviewed and perhaps they are just a tad fed up aswell!

I don't mind the PCGamer one as much. I think something got taken out of context, but I'm on that boat with Paradox now. I'm not buying anymore of their products at release after HoI3 and Semper Fi didn't seem to fix anything. But I find Elemental to be complete and works just fine, well, did, before the one patch broke the archery, but that was supposed to be fixed with the hotfix. To each his or her own. I still have faith in Stardock and would recommend Elemental to others in the current state. I'd just tell friends with ATI cards to give it a bit, until the OOM bug and other issues are resolved.

I don't buy that...just about every game from Stardock was reviewed extremly high by PC Gamer, for instance Sins got a 91 from PC Gamer.

And to be perfectly honest this is one of the worst releases I have seen in a long time.  I can't even remember the last game I had that was bugged to a point where you simply could not progress. 

Obviously this is my own personal experience, which may be different from yours. 

Because it is a simple way of saying would you pay for half of something, relating to an item that for the most part people pay alot of money for and expect to work from day one.

Therefor it triggers the same thoughts and feelings that are being conveyed, which in turn gets the reader thinking in the right way.

Given that all you could get from my reply was that single quote and no defense against the rest ... i needn't say anymore.

I don't think the guy even played the game out. I think he went forum hopping and got mad because someone told him to STFU with his complaining and then he went back to PCgamer in a rage and just degraded the character of Stardock and Brad et al. They should SUE PCgamer imho....I would. All he basically did was rant about "don't buy this game" boo hoo hoo. He gave basic information anyone would know about the game itself but he was more interested in blasting Stardock than doing even that.

You can't play this game 5 minutes and have an honest opinion about the ENTIRE game or experience. I questioned a guy the other day who said he fininished it in 12 hours only to find out he did a lot of "end turn end turn end turn" just to get to the finish. That's not playing or experencing everything it's just a rush to a review.

I take little salt with PCgamer reviews anymore anyways. I am a fan of Tom Chick though and hope he has more diplomacy when he gives his review of the ENTIRE game not just out of the box. I wish William Trotter were still reviewing games he was the best.

It's because the big studios are the ones buying all the advertising which is where the magazines and sites make all their money. As a result game magazines are very hesitant to publish an overly critical review of their flagship games (particularly the ones with big advertising budgets) for fear of the ads being pulled and losing all that revenue. Stardock, on the other hand, is an indie studio with a small advertising budget, so consequently they are less reluctant to be critical.

Edit: this comment was made in the context of the discussion about there being a double standard, which certainly there is and is easy enough to understand if you follow the money.

PC Gamer isn't the publication it used to be, that's for sure.  Things went downhill fast after Greg Verderman left.  He was pretty much the last of the "old guard".