Very fair review.  I love this quote:

 It really is the damndest thing: even with the instability issues, even with its utter inaccessibility for newcomers to strategy games (and to a large extent, experienced players with anything less than an abundance of patience), I still want to make time to play Elemental. 

Demigod was actually only published by Stardock.  It was made by Gas Powered Games (of Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander, etc), which tends to try a lot of cool things in their games but they've pretty much been all over the place as to how good they actually are as a whole.  They didn't really have that kind of hand in development.

That being said, I think the IGN review is fair (which is quite a compliment, as I really don't think very much of IGN's reviewing much of the time), and I appreciate that it doesn't ride the tide of sensationalism that's surrounded the game since release.  It's matter-of-fact, unbiased, and relatively well informed.  The quote FutileEmotion brought up sums it up best of all, which I think highlights the overall state of the game.  It has an excellent, excellent core experience to it; just the stuff draped upon it needs work and polish.   Once it gets that work, I can see a prospective score (though Brad doesn't want, understandably, the base game re-reviewed) being far, far higher.

Stardock still did multiplayer code for demigod, so they didn't just publish. Remember which part sucked? Despite months of beta testers telling them it wasn't ready, despite frogboy himself saying that anything less than 95% success rate was unacceptable (paraphrased)?

The big issue with Demigod (We played it LAN out fo the box with 10 people worked great) was that so many people pirated it, that the servers were so damn overloaded. There were a few hand shake issues ive read as well but nothing to serious.

I agree with the review in most aspects, and am glad they acknowledged the exellent support we've received so far.  I'd personally rate Elemental at around 7/10.

@Wazatiste: love Spike Obama

I haven't bought Elemental yet (although I own every Stardock game). I love Stardocks Ideals towards gamers and will support them with my hard earn cash. Elemental has high expectation from me considering all I've read from the dev journals. I was hoping for better reviews just to justify me buying it! But I know how [Stardock] listens to us and tries to fix what we don't like. I'll buy it and hope for the best.

Thanks, added to the main game review thread.

It happens.  They still have a great track record, and Elemental will be "fixed".  Other than the bugs and a poor mechnic here and there, I do not feel that the game is broken.. per se.  I think it needs to be fleshed out.

Vanilla GC2 was like this.  By the second expansions and several adjustments later, it has become a top 5 game for me. 

I am enjoying Elemental more than Civ 4 complete.  Right now, they crash about the same for me.

This review agreed with my opinion on the game, thus it is the most correct review.

You may have a point. When the reviewer adds a "Two weeks out and the game still feels like a beta" tag line to the review title and gives it a 6.0 score, which in their scoring system is supposed to be passable, it is hard to imagine that the reviewer has seriously considered using the full 1-10 span as there is a serious disconnect between what his score is supposed to represent and his own comments.

Unless he considers games that feel like a beta to be passable, of course, though most people would consider that aiming rather low.

Yeah... like say, Elemental "beta" 1.

No, I mean that reviewers are in the habit of calling any game with bugs or undercooked features a "beta".  It gets a bit silly after a while.