From my point of view, you can perceive it as finished, because it's fairly stable (for me), it's playable, and I really like its artistic style.
However, it tries to do many things at once and IMO fails at most of them.
- It fails providing interesting system of spells - Dominions 3 IMO succeeds here much, much better with really wonderful synergy. Even the old MoM offers much more varied and interesting.
One example - in Dom3, you can cast a global Eternal Darkness that makes all the world go dark - creatures with infravision and other means of orienting gain advantage, humans are terrified and blind. Vow.
In Elemental, most spells are like "blablabla, you get +1 bonus for this and that".
- It fails providing an interesting combat system mainly because it forgets to acknowledge lessons other games learned the hard way in the past. Again, games like Dominions 3 or Age of Wonders are much better here. Biggest flaws here - unit facing is not taken into account, so flanking has little value. Unit attacked by multiple enemies has no penalties to defense, hence formations and local superiority concepts are not useful in the game. The weapons have one simplistic "strength" which creates a linear scale from better to worse, abolishing all interesting choices - in other games, you have multiple types of damage and armor, and synergy between units that offer combo opportunities. Finally, there are no interesting combat abilities to speak of. Other games offer ethereal, magic, immolating creatures, various auras with effects, special effects on attacks, etc. You won't find it here. Unit design seems flat for the same reason.
- There are features that feel unfinished, like the family tree. IMO it has negligible gameplay impact. There are seas, you can build one type of ship, but that's it. Seas in the game are boring. In Dominions, you have whole undewater empires (Rylegh), monsters that creep from the see and terrorize the coasts, and also artifacts that will enable you to enter the seas with conventional armies and bring the war to them.
- The factions are uninteresting - they are mostly people dressed in different colors with various +1/-1 bonuses. Sure, there is a background story, but somehow it feels so bland you won't be able to remember. For players - just try to name most interesting events in Capitar history. I bet you can't remember.
- The towns look like hives. I know that there is detail when you zoom in, but it still looks like bug colonies for me.
- The interface, though really pretty, is not very intuitive. The key info is always somewhere unexpected. Usually not all at once on one screen. Some bits of it are missing.
If you like somewhat flat, simplified, accountant-style gameplay where you optimize mundane tasks, go for it. But IMO you won't find anything captivating, deep, thought-provoking inside. It's pretty, though.
Sorry devs, that's just how I see the game after those months I tried to play it.
