Fallen Enchantress Gets a 9.5 from Gaming All The Time

Nice review though I'm not so sure that WOM was much of a "hit" for you guys..

He was probably referring to SoASE or GalCiv2.

His quote:

"Elemental was also the name of the world in Stardock’s 2010 hit War of Magic, however this has almost nothing to do with that game."

Pretty clear, give the date and the link to FE in his quote, that he was talking about WOM.  

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not crapping on the review.  It's a decent review (and any good buzz for FE is good in my book).  I just thought it was worth mentioning.  Might be the only time anyone ever called WOM a hit.  

It hit Stardock and its customers in the stomach.

This couldn't be more true... 

It's good they didn't make the same mistake (in my book).

I read the review and I missed that reference.  you probably should have quoted that bit in your comment.  otherwise it sounds like you're referring to the bit quoted by the OP.  It is weird that he would call that WoM a "hit".

Hence my mentioning of it.  

i for one am quite willing to forget wom... we have fe now

good review

How do you guys at Stardock find these obscure review websites?

players postt hose, but I think big named sites don't have attention spans to check such a game..

maybe users could ask them to , though?

Bizarre. It is as if that review were written by at least two completely different people who failed to communicate with one another. The introduction is exceptionally well written, and then in the review area itself, the second paragraph reads as if my 11-year-old had written it:

The two mistakes in the second sentence made me shudder.

I stopped reading after the mention of Stardock's smash "hit" of 2010.

Reviewers are not who you want to ask about a game before you buy anyway.  Just check the Support section of the forums and look at all the reported bugs.  That's all you should concern yourself with when buying a game these days, because whatever problems do exist you're going to have to live with them until they are fixed.  The sooner that reviewers start to pick up on this, the sooner it will become a priority for developers to ship a higher-quality product at release.

Of course you know that some reviewers are horribly biased or incompetent anyway and that won't change.

But also some support issues are hardware or driver issues -- i do not get a lot of them.

It's still useful as a gauge of how likely you are to have problems.

That is true.

That said, you can also use reviews for this purpose.  When I go to metacritic, I usually look for the bottom ranked review (that I can read) and check to see if they are reporting technical problems (and then I go to a high ranked review and see if I like the features they like -- the numbers do not mean anything to me except that they give me a way of picking reviews to read).

Maybe it's a typo and he forgot the s.

Not really.  The support forums are a biased sample because the people most likely to post there are the ones having problems.

When you have a good game, and the mainstream sites are too busy to cover your game, you gotta go looking.  Also, the reviews are important in restoring Stardock's reputation after WOM.   It's not a conspiracy against Stardock, this is just the busy time of the year for reviewers.

Brad has always taken a long-term approach with Stardock in general from what I've seen over the years, it's his nature.  This game is more about helping the sales of future Stardock games than what it sells on its own.  Stardock's reputation took a huge hit in 2010 between WOM and some other incidents, and WOM was a very bad first impression for many folks.

Ironically, Impulse might have helped Stardock out here, because a large number of newer gamers didn't even consider WOM because it wasn't on Steam, so FE is their first exposure to Stardock outside of the bad press of the last couple of years.

If you want to see long-term damage, look at how much of a dive Capcom's taken this gen.  That's what Stardock is trying to avoid.  And Capcom's a company that deserves the damage it's getting.