Empire of Ember Reviews

This game... is very special. Mount and Blade style fantasy game with combat sorcery of Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. With randomly generated dungeons and plenty of way to play. You have Melee, Archer and Sorcery, they all have there own skill trees and a player levelling system. (You get 2 points to spend on stats per level up.) To top it all off you get a rather simple town builder that you have to defend. There were a few issues at launch with the game not loading the Wizard tower correctly and the melee not being that great but those have been fixed. The game is still in early access and still has a few niggles and optimisation issues. The Troop Command wheel works fine with controllers but is rather sluggish with Mouse and Keyboard. The combat is fun using Telekinesis to yeet barrels and other objects at your enemies, or push over towers with Archers in! You can be creative with how you approach missions and have decisions to make in your kingdom. Be a good guy or a bad guy that's up to you. Looking forward to what this game will bring in the future. All the best Poleaxe Games :D

I like the ideas behind the game. Unfortunately the devs abandoned the game. Therefore its quite unplayable.

I cant recommend this game but i refuse to refund. I see the work and ideas coming together. Its a really good idea and i wish it to succeed. Give it a try; if your PC can handle it, you can get past its unfinished menu, and see whats been slapped together here its almost a strounghold warband(with wizards)(not really strounghold more of the castle building part..). Anyway with alittle optimization and control changes i think this game will be in a better place

Yes, the game has undoubtedly been released MONTHS too early. Yes, there are bugs. Yes, the management UI is incredibly opaque and tough to figure out. Yes, you don't generally know what you are supposed to do and the tutorial is extremely bare-bones for anything beyond the first person controls. And, honestly, there are more issues... However, despite all of these things: The game is just great fun, and has incredible potential to be even better once all of these issues have been fixed (and I hope they will).

I refunded this over a year ago but can still review it for whatever reason, so here is the most important information: Game was released and within a couple days the devs went into total radio silence on all their accounts. No updates of any kind, or patches, or literally anything. They cut and ran virtually on day one, so fuck these morons and don't waste your money. Also the game sucks despite a terrific vision and good foundation.

Extremely clunky, poorly optimized and a bit unbalanced I think the game is exactly what I'm looking for in terms of what it wants to be but unfortunately it is not close enough to an acceptable state right now. I will probably keep checking on this game to see how it improves but for now I can't enjoy it as is.

Checked and found this game was out of EA, so I went to give it a play. Unfortunately, I could not finish the game, as it is so broken that it is impossible to complete, what a shame

I like the game, it needs allot of work tho. Town building is very limited at the moment, you can do decorations and a couple of income buildings for wood,metal and gold at the moment and buildings that unlock some unit types that you can recruit. The combat is a bit wonky, the melee attacks dont hit exactly where you are looking. The magic wand seems to be the best weapon as you can run away a little and fire magic bolts at enemies. Commanding your soldiers in first person or in overview mode is also pretty wonky, the unit command wheel shows up while saving the game in the tower and giving commands would work better if it used mount and blade system of the F1-F12keys instead of the command wheel we currently got. The overview command is pretty slow, making it hard to give quick commands to selected troops giving the enemy time to attack you while you are trying to organize your troops. I played on normal difficulty and lost a couple times to careless hits by the enemy mob, but most of the time i was one shot killed by enemy magic.This needs to be tweaked to make dungeons easier to do and town defense easier to survive. The story is pretty good and deaths so far sends you back to the tower with less loot, i would recommend checking this out if you dont have a problem with early access games, if you do then its best that you wait as this game has it flaws. Update 07.04.2021 The developer added Fkey commands making it allot easier to order your troops around during battle making the game allot better then it was before. Dungeons are still a hit and miss system where you get ganked hard on a very easy dungeon but manage to beat a very hard dungeon just barley. Still no potion system tho and its unlikely the developer will add one. I hope a companions system is added at some point but i doubt it as it seems that would require funds they dont have. Despite its flaw and how you have to smash everything for loot over and over again, this game is getting better. Update 03.03.2022 The magic is still wonky, tried to use it on goblins in tutorial but the barrel killed me lol so dumb. Restarted and went full health and lasted a bit longer during the attack but died before i could level up a shame but expected. Now the city building is sadly the same as far as i can tell, nothing seem to have been improved there making city building pretty pointless for anything other then resources like wood etc. Combat is okay tho i wish there was another way to get loot other then smashing everything manually, it gets old very fast. There seem to be a couple new unit types so that is nice as well as some new quests. The game has improved a little but not by much, i am really sad that the town development is not a thing in this game. But for what this game does its an average game that is fun in small doses.

The game in a few words: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic meets Mount and Blade. TLDR: The Wizard lord simulator I have been looking for. You manage your wizard tower, recruit troops, and go on missions with or without your troops (they won't help you in dungeons). I think the game nailed the interactions between these different parts very well. You do feel like being a wizard in his tower, improving your settlement and recruiting fireball fodder to buy you time to annihilate the enemy. The action is split in "days" between which you will heal and restore your mana, and either investigate leads (about secondary quests), bolster the economy of your city through alchemy, or prepare enchantments to make the next battle easier or more rewarding. You have storyline missions, side quests, and roaming hostile groups to deal with. Combat can be pretty brutal as you don't have a lot of mana or hitpoints, and even less ways to recover your hitpoints. I spent my 10 hours playing a mage (I didn't try a melee or ranger build). Spells work a bit differently than usual: they have a long-ish casting time, and can even take some time to take effect, but winning feels good because of it: As I had lost all of my soldiers, and was down to a few hitpoints, trying to finish the enemy before taking a final arrow to the chest reminded me of these times as the last survivor of my party in Mount and Blade, with a lance and a horse against dozens of opponents. I didn't run into any major issue lately, and the ones I encountered early on (I was the first Windows 7 tester) were patched very quickly(within one hour). It has some minor issues (placing buildings can be a bit cumbersome, townsfolk animation is a bit off, some opponents having pathfinding issues), but nothing too serious. I think the game is very promising, and I had good fun already.

Looks like a small studio and as such the visuals of the game are appealing. However the balance needs tweaking. Even on normal difficulty the dungeons are tough. The game heavily focuses on having minions in battle but forgets that you dont get any in a dungeon. Also - WHAT IS UP WITH MANA?!?!? Trying to be a spell caster in this game is extremely tough - you get crap for mana, it takes FOREVER to replenish - and if you get hit, run, or perform any action regeneration stops. It forces a magic user to rely soley on the wands and staves. And its also terrible for ranged and melee builds. I open up with a barrage of nearby barrels, and then basically forget about magic the rest of combat. Occasionally in small battle breaks I'll use summon undead but that can only be used 3 times a battle?! Stupid. I havent really tried using bow and arrow yet. Regardless melee and magic users shouldnt be penalized. Also there isn't alot of variations yet in the game, but its still an early game. It really feels like the developers had a particular play style in mind but it wasn't clearly articulated in the game advertisements. The game really feels like it's supposed to mainly be about management of your town and army with fps elements blended in. However, the command and control feature of the game are unwieldy even after using the fkey update. You basically have to memorize all the commands otherwise youre going to get stabbed or blasted while reading through the command menus. Combat needs a lot of tweaking, and the interface isnt user friendly. It took me forever to figure out how to research new buildings - devs should change this to a feature of the tower instead of a feature inside build mode. Also there is no clock inside your tower - minor annoying feature that could easily be added. Also need to get rid of the story driven character generation. Its a nun story feature but players should be allowed to skip in favor of a more standard character generation. The game needs a more intuitive interface and better tool tips. Overall the story and game concept are good, the visuals are decent - but the balance and combat needs refining. - UPDATE - Tried using bow and arrow, seems to be the most effective build combined with mana. Feels like battle archery is the about the only way to play this game. Also for DEVS: the first mission is glitched for sure, possibly others. At the end of it I accidentally died due to a building crushing me, but upon respawning at the tower I still had ALL the loot for the mission. You can spam this infinitely getting as many ember shards as you want and delaying the start of the game until your OP. This is about the only way I can play the game though even on normal difficulty. I'll do the quest until I'm about level 10 (about day 35) but EVEN THEN the late game is still freakin tough.