Review of Players Option: Heroes of the Elemental Chaos

I think the book would have jumped a whole point in my estimation if they'd just given the elementalist appropriate 'bending' powers, a la Avatar: The Last Airbender. Make them cantrips or something, but let earth sorcerers extrude rocks from the ground, water sorcerers create shields of water, and so on. Flavor is important, and while a lot of the recent "Heroes of" books had great flavor, the class options in this one weren't as tasty.

 

[Windjammer]

It's an experiment. They offered to write a review in exchange for a link; I figured I'd try one and see what people though of the review. Just a different way of paying for content; the question is: is it any good?

Unfortunately, it's hard to see what is good in the review.

The author doesn't once display familiarity with the game she's reviewing content for. There's no actual assessment of the product, just a run-down of the TOC which I could do without having read the product and without knowing anything about 4e. The end result is a review that sits uneasily on a website that once housed the strongest and most thorough RPG reviews in the d20 heyday. Enworld has strong review standards, and guest reviewers should be aware of these and respect them.

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[abel_marko]

Review Quality: extremely low

Having read the review, I'm having a little trouble deciding whether it was written by a computer program or a person who never read the book.

The fact that the actual material referenced all comes from the book excerpts published by Wizards suggests that it's the former - a computer program would have done a better job of incorporating details from those excerpts.

Terrible.

 

[Alphastream]

I'm not a fan of having casino sites write a review with a link to their own product.

There are plenty of sites reviewing 4E material in far superior fashion. While I think many liked Heroes of the Feywild better, this book is easily amongst the better player options books for 4E, has content that is really useful for DMs, and is very useful for all kinds of campaigns. A review should really at least touch upon some of the really innovative aspects of the book. Elemental Companions? Themes as altering your nature? Themes and class aspects with a dark edge of being controlled by elemental powers?

How about the return of some classics like the Sha'ir? Elemental familiars? This review was as enjoyable as a gambling addiction. Don't gamble, EN World... the casino is the only one that ends up winning.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I would have to recommend not having this site do this again. I got the book a few days ago, and a lot of stuff was not covered.