Emberward
Build twisting mazes with tetromino blocks and deploy unique towers in this engaging roguelite tower defense game!
Emberward is a early access, tower defense and strategy game
developed and published by Refic Games.
Released on June 25th 2024 is available only on Windows
in 4 languages: English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Japanese.
It has received 2,085 reviews of which 2,030 were positive and 55 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.3 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 14.79€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Emberward into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7/10/11
- Processor: 4GHz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: 2GB GPU Memory, capable of OpenGL 3.0+ support
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Got this game after watching Fauna playing it. Pretty good game I must say, although there's not a lot of content yet, and some towers might do with a buff or two, maybe a few more hours and those seemingly under-powered towers may shine.
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I'll start by saying that I've really enjoyed this game, to the point where I have found myself thinking of the most optimal maze setup for any room I'm sitting in. That being said, I think there are some things that could be adjusted before full release (take these with a grain of salt, I'm by no means an incredible TD game player, so some of these might be skills issues more than issues with the game itself). -Right now it seems like poison has a lot of relics that buff it and allow it to either takeover other elements' niches (poison slow relic) or function as the best support tower (relics that react with fire and electricity). Don't think there's an issue with that necessarily, as long as the other elements are given relics the give them unique buffs as well. -Piggybacking off of the previous point, the game pushes you to have a variety of elements to get bonuses from relics, I think it could be interesting to have relics that give bonuses for having a variety of the same element of tower (ie, chill inflicts DOT if you control 3 or more different frost towers). This way players can have more ways of going through the game and aren't finding themselves in positions where they feel like they have to get one of each element to make sure that they can trigger any element specific relics. -Elemental relics almost always feel preferable to non-elemental relics. Could just be my playstyle but having that extra boost of damage/tower effectiveness often gave me enough time earlygame to get decent runs going. If I didn't get one of those relics from the start, I felt like I almost had to restart to get one. -Hammer tower feels off, the 2x2 range can't really be fully utilized in most mazes I felt. This in turn makes the knight feel weaker because sometimes you'll only get tower loadouts with the hammer tower and end up not using it all. -Feel like lightning towers could have a more unique feel or status effect (maybe lower defenses or just gaining a chance to chain). -Could just be my playstyle but I find myself using fire for a majority of my damage. The great relics for fire (lava bucket and the one that causes poisoned targets to explode when they take fire damage) plus the 2x2 fire tower being one of the best in game make fire feel significantly more powerful than the other elements. -1x1 towers could use more variety in their upgrades beyond a) more damage or b) more range and fire rate. Perhaps a second split upgrade choice for these towers that adds more uniqueness to how they function after the initial decision between dmg and fire rate. -Relics added that give players a reason to use normal type towers. Like I've said above, the elemental reactions to one another after a few relics are acquired make them feel drastically better to use than normal towers, meaning normal towers usually aren't placed after the first or second battle. A relic that gave players a reason to use these types of towers could help with this. -Characters could use some tweaking. The old man that give economic bonuses feels drastically better than the other two unlockable characters. The big man that gives megablocks could use a rework imo, the large blocks are often a hindrance to making tight mazes and are straight up nearly impossible to use on corrupted levels. Something that allows these megablocks to ignore corrupted tiles or doubles the amount of boost tiles they have could help encourage players to use the big man. -After corrupted levels, I think the relic should be chosen before the tower, so that your tower choice can be guided by whichever relic you've chose. Again, I've really enjoyed this game and will grind it when the full release comes out and recommend it to TD fans. I think if some of the kinks are worked out it could really do a lot for the replayability of the game. EDIT AFTER SEPTEMBER 6 UPDATE: I'm a big fan of the new additions to the game, they've made it so I'm not constantly spamming fire towers on each playthrough. The new character, Tiny, is great and makes parts of the game that can sometimes be ignored (like inspiration runes) significantly more important. The added ice level is a significant jump in difficultly and it took me several tries before I could finally beat it (a plus for me because the first two levels aren't terribly hard once you've unlocked all the upgrades). My only suggestion now would be add relics/characters that combo/improve with other aspects of the game outside of tower types and econ (my thought is to add other relics or a character that cares about drawing cards, so the discard and draw relic that was just added is more appealing to take, as of right now I can't imagine a situation where I'd have it high on my list of relics that'd I'd want to pick). Only small issues I'll raise are: I still think the megablock character needs to be tweaked since his kit doesn't work for most stages, the indicator that a block is about to be frozen could be made more obvious (I think it's a blue effect on blue terrain which is hard to see sometimes), and clearer descriptions for how burn, poison, and charge work based on enemy health (this will let players be smarter on their early, mid, and end of maze tower placement). Outside of those small nitpicks, I'd say the last two updates have drastically improved the replayability of the game and I hope for more updates like these as the game gets closer to a full release.
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This is my first review of a game ever (account is 18 years old). It is not normally something I do, but this game is just... AMAZING! I have played tower defense games all my gaming life (shoutout "W3 Line Tower Defense"). This is the best TD game ever made. I am completly without doubt. Everything is either near perfect or just straight up perfect: Overall game design, mazing posibilities, tower variety, "Slay the Spire"-ish dungeon crawl, big bad bosses and so much more is 10/10. Best. TD. Game. Ever. I cannot stress how much fun it already is even though it is still in early access. The possibilities for this game is endless. Refic Games, I love you, keep doing excactly what you are doing!
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I have played a lot of of tower defense games, and this is by far the best one no contest, with a slight exception. There is, currently, not much replay-ability. The game is in early access, and this will probably change, but the best way to fix this is either procedural generated maps or custom player maps. Regardless, baseline this is the best no question.
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At the time of writing, I have over 20+ hours in this game across demo and playtest branches. As someone who has had the pleasure of playtesting this game and working closely with Refi, this is a MUST have for the tower defense genre. This game is a wonderful mix of both tower defense, rogue lites, and puzzles! Yes, this game is in Early Access - this does not mean that the game is broken and full of bugs, but rather there will just be more content added down the road. Gameplay The core gameplay revolves around placing various towers along your own maze of blocks. Think Tetris meets tower defense. On top of that, there is a roguelite element in which you have randomized loadouts of starting towers and abilities which you get more of as the game progresses. Each round, you will be faced with waves of enemies racing towards your "fire" which acts as your life. When monsters reach your fire, you will take damage. Once your fire reaches 0 hp, your run will end. There are two main components into keeping these monsters away: building tiles and towers. Building Blocks & Towers Building blocks come in a variety of shapes and sizes, similar to the familiar Tetris shapes. These blocks can be rotated and placed around the playing field to make the path that the monsters need to take longer and more complicated. Then, you can build towers on these placed blocks or on pre-existing blocks that are placed upon starting the level. These towers come in a variety of sizes (1x1, 2x2, 1x2, etc), damage types (arcane, ice, fire, etc), and costs. Most towers can be upgraded as well, leaving you with the decision on whether or not to build even more towers or upgrade the existing ones. Once you successfully fend off monsters for X number of rounds (which is pre-determined and will be visible on each level), then you will be rewarded with EXP, Ember Stones, and potentially new blocks and/or buffs. EXP & Ember Stones EXP is used to buy talents which you can purchase between rounds to give you permanent buffs to each of your runs. Some of these include Shop Discounts, Active Skills such as the ability to unlock a placed block once per game, giving your fire the ability to attack monsters just to name a few. Ember Stones allow for restoring energy to your fire or you can use them to purchase upgrades and items at the Shop. Boss Rounds At the end of a run, you will face the final Boss for that world. Here, rounds will play out as usual except for one difference: there is a giant buffed monster that you must defeat! The Boss can be damaged over time and will ultimately make its way to your fire over multiple rounds. Graphics This game features colorful and polished graphics matched with catchy music and sound effects. This game runs flawlessly on both my PC and Steam Deck (with mapped controls as there is not yet controller support) without any loss of frames despite all of the actors on the screen. Accessibility At the time of review, the game features the following accessibility options: • Camera Shake - A slider to determine the strength of the camera shake • Turn off timer • Flash Intensity - A slider to determine the flash intensity • Recall Block - Choice between long press or one button press • Static Background - There are some moving maps such as a train which can be turned to a static background by enabling this option Replayability - In Depth At the start of a run, players get to choose from three difficulties: Casual, Normal, and Heroic (which is unlocked after defeating the boss in Normal mode!). Then, you get to select the world that you will be playing in. Then you once again get more choices, your character (which offers different buffs and quirks to the run) and a fire type. These choices will allow players to challenge themselves or build around their play style. Do you want massive blocks? Great, check out Chunk the Builder ! Do you want to be able to hoard lots of money to be able to afford some bigger towers and upgrades? Then Silas the Merchant might be your guy! Once choosing the above, you get to pick a loadout which determines which different blocks you start with in your deck as well as a buff that will last the rest of the game. With all of these options, it means that each and every run will be unique and the replayability is endless. Closing Thoughts This is an outstanding addition to my game library and constantly gets updates. A huge congratulations to Refi for being the ONLY developer working on this game. He responds quickly to all feedback and bug reports and fixes them as soon as possible. If you enjoy tower defense games in any way, I highly recommend picking up this game. This is an outstanding price for this game in which you will have unlimited replayability and tons of updates to in the future. Happy building!
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 10 January 2025 01:03 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 17 January 2025 22:34 |
| Steam price | 22 January 2025 20:16 |
| Steam reviews | 21 January 2025 12:03 |
