Ember Reviews

trash

Interesting game slowly putting things together it takes time to build. It has challenging parts. Think about movement think about your attacks. A slight learning curve. But play it slow and smart and can be successful.

I got this game several years ago but never got to play it until now. It clearly shows it's age. The beginning was pretty rough, moving around the map with point and click felt really clunky and in chokepoints it was sometimes hard to navigate if one of your partymembers blocked the others. Overall it was hard getting used to especially since holding the mouse down lets you move the camera. In that regard, fighting felt really clunky aswell as you only have limited options at your disposal while your party fights enemies on their own. You can pause the game at any point to individually move your partymembers out of harms way. You have 3 active skills at your disposal that are tied to the Weapon and Armor you use. Skills cost mana, but since they have no cooldown, you are encouranged to pause the game mid fight over and over in order to activate skills on all 3 characters. This makes fighting optimally more tactical but not exciting at all. But if you pull through and endure the beginning, you'll rapidly notice that underneath all these rough systems, there's a lot of love poured into the game despite the clearly showing lack of budget. The Story is rather generic (hero's quest) but they added lots of side dialogue and lore-books if you want to know more about the world. The pacing is really good between advancing main story and doing side quests on the way. The Areas look nice and the map artwork is beautiful. Along the way you'll find lots of food, herbs and ore to mine that are used for crafting. They put a lot of work into the different types: cooking, woodworking, tailoring, alchemy and blacksmithing. You can buy recipies from vendors or obtain them by looting chests. While there's really a LOT of different ingredients, the crafting menu was terribly inconvenient. So much that besides some basic cooking i didnt further bother diving into it and used the items i found along the way or bought from vendors. Really missed potential Inventory management is clean with each item using up one space in your 99 slot bag. Later in the game you'll find additional 16 slot bags for more inventory space but unfortunately item stacks dont merge (so if you put 1 iron ore in one of you small bags to make room in the big bag, mining another iron ore will still use up space in the big bag as you have 2 stacks of 1 ore each until you manually drag it). Each item you find has a description that tells you exactly what it is used for so you can easily distinguish items used in crafting from items beeing solely useful to make gold selling to vendors. Character progression is basic. You have 3 types: Melee in Heavy Armor using Strenght as main Attribute, Ranged in leather armor using Dexterity and Magic in light Armor using Intelligence. The 4th Attribute is Vitality for more Health. As mentioned before, skills are tied to the Weapon/Armor you use so you can test around which ones fit your playstyle most The game itself runs very well and i havent encountered a single bug in the game, so kudos to the programming team. Steam achievements are easily obtainable in one playthrough with one exception: After visiting the giants cliffs for the first time and beeing sent back to the city of light, save the game before accepting the quest, do the quest in one way until you receive the achievement, then reload the game and do it the other way for the second achievement (there are steamguides explaining this). There are 2 different endings to the story, you can either replay the final bossfight reloading the game, or watch the alternative ending sequence on youtube. [h3] Conclusion: [/h3] Despite it's sometimes very rough edges, i enjoyed my playthrough in Ember. It's clear the developers put a lot of love in their game with much attention to detail. If you can look past the flaws i mentioned above, you'll have yourself a fine little 20h adventure.