dragoaskani seems to think that gaming "journalists" from big sites have some special skills that make their reviews more relevant than anyone else's.

Gimme a break. It's probably the opposite since the publisher ad revenue they generate makes their credibility suspect compared to a 100% independent reviewer.

IGN is a major gaming review site so their reviews are automatically more credible, right?

Oh wait...

Games aimed at completely differnet target markets (on different hardware with different abilities and control schemes) get judged based on different criteria? Oh the horror!

Next thing you know they'll tell me that cook books and fantasy novels don't use the same ranking criteria either!

Let's be fair here.  All we can do at this point is to average the reviews thus far and give it a grade.  So let's see:

Neoseeker: .90

1 Up: .77 (C+)

Out of 8: .625 (5/8)

GameEnema: .6 (6/10)

Average = .72 (C -)

The point I'm making is that all these big sites ultimately use arbitary numbers to assign a grade to games. Their writing skills aren't any better than independent reviewers, and they generally have less time to review games since they are on strict deadlines. Couple that with the fact that their main source of revenue is from ads (from game publishers) and it makes for an unreliable combination. 

It's stupid to dismiss independent game reviewers just because they don't have as many reviews as professional game sites.

Hungary

iPon

http://ipon.hu

 57%

I'm more with Tridus on this one. You posted an example of two games one of which did you even play? I don't think it's a requirement for a review site to only give me reviews that I agree with, especially when there are certain series people will dismiss by the "cover" and not actually play. I am not sure any of the Settlers series ever got much higher than a 6 or a 7 and that was one of my favorite series. They are, however, for particular tastes.

The neoseeker review is quite fun.

Yeah, sure. Did we play the same game? Did you see ANY explanation of what diplomatic capital is, or how it works? Neither in the documentation nor the Hiergamenon.

You assume quit a bit about what I think. You don't have the reasoning skills to manage that so stop trying. Its also stupid to put too much stock in someones first review ever on a brand new site with no history. For all we know its the one and only review this mouth breather will ever do. It has nothing to do with the size of the companies doing the review you asinine air head and everything to do with building a reputation for quality reviews. Clearly you must have read all his previous reviews to feel the way you do. Oh wait there are no previous reviews. You should learn to try to use that thing stuck between your ears that you call a brain.

Yeah I thought the Neoseeker review was laughably bad.  As you mentioned, he called it easy to learn and 'accessible'.  Um.  I would consider myself a veteran of the genre and compared to all of my favorites, Elemental is near the bottom of the list for accessibility.

He then goes out of his way to praise both the single player campaign and the tactical combat, both of which are huge weaknesses.  He also does not mention the almost complete lack of accurate documentation which is...kind of important for a 4x game.

I like the summary in the OutOfEight review:

What say you? Part turn-based strategy, part city management, part role-playing game, partly finished, occasionally fun: 5/8

I think it describes the current state of Elemental well.

updated list! 

Another quality post from our friend here, let's all give a hand to the one, the only Dragoaskannnnnnnniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.  How 'bout we, you know, base judgments on actual content rather than 'experience.'  That turd Eric Nahler's been farting out terrible reviews at 1up for years (I mean, read his Yakuza review... its a comedy goldmine)... Tim Rogers has been inflicting reviews on the public for god knows how long.

The fact that people feel the need to resort to adhominem attacks in defense of a video game (calling the other foolish, no less) is totally hilarious.

He did say it had to do with the reputation of the reviewer not the company. I can see you chose to read over that part and focus on the insults instead though.

Hehe, the neoseeker review is funny indeed.

No hints on practically useless unit design coz it's all just the same with just a little more +X here n there but no special abilities or t he complete lack of flying units. No hints on magic spells being all the same with just a bit mo oomph. Not mentioned that the major magic element namely shards are pretty much useless atm due to broken damage calculation in spell xmls, the crappy AI and countless other issues that have been brought up and confirmed in this very forum.

It's simply just an ode to Elemental and therefore just as useless as the die-hard fanbois consider other gamers' complaints to be.