Simple and pretty linear, but fun. Typical game for rental.
The game begin when in a TV station a meteorologist is lay off cause he "forecast only bad weather". Unfortunately the new jobless instead to ask the unemployment benefit decides to retaliate creating a device able to create and control natural disaster like storms, tornados and even quakes and meteor shower. As you can deduce from the title itself, Elements of Destruction allows the player to follow the mad scientist during twenty-one days of indiscriminate destruction.
Each day represent a game level where you must destroy as much objects as possible (and for objects I mean buildings, farms, factories, etc.) trying to achieve a specific goal (destruction of some critic structures or a certain amount of dollars in damage) to proceed on the next stage.
Game uses both directional cross than stylus control.
Directional cross is only meant to move the viewpoint across the levels (often pretty large); stylus is needed for selection, creation and movement control of the catastrophes. All action on the touch screen consist in brief sweeps of the stylus, but the movements detection system is not perfectly reliable forcing you to repeat the action more times to obtain the intended action.
Either graphic than sound are minimal, but functional.
Really there's a little perverse fun seeing the storms devastating the little sceneries of the game just like a kid enjoy in throw imaginary cannon balls to an army of toy soldier.
However the game is all here. To complicate a bit the game play we have protective structures and drones.
Protective structures are special buildings with various functionalities like storms dissipation, tornados repulsion, quakes' vibrations absorption, etc.
Destruction of this structures requires a bit of strategy during assaults so to not exhaust in vain the energy needed for disasters' creation.
Drones are flying machines able to repair damaged buildings or fix totally fallen structures and can be taken out only with lighting storm (the basic disaster you can create).
Final Line
This game is short, simple and unassuming, but though his linearity and is slippery control can entertain while last. Just sufficient, but recommended to players who loved Sim City only to take down the city just completed.