Emberlight

Review

Selecting to start a new game you’ll be taken to Quests screen. Here you will notice that the quests are divided into four levels. You start on the surface, where you can choose from two quests to play through; further quests will take you underground as you make your way towards The Corruption. After choosing in which quest to partake, your next job is to choose your party members. Currently there are only three-party members you can choose from, although there are plans for more characters and subclasses in the future.  For now you can choose from Pyromancer (Arcane), Blaze Knight (Physical) and Smoke-Shrouded (Psionic) characters. You can choose any of these three as you see fit, which includes selecting the same class multiple times.

Also on the party screen, below the characters, is your corruption bar; this will fill and level up your characters as you progress through the game, and will unlock a new corruption subclass upon reaching the required level, such as the Pyromancers Inferno. This unlocks when reaching the corruption level Twenty-One, whereas the Blaze Knights, Hell Knight will unlock once the corruption level hits level Twenty.

Once you have finished selecting your party members, it’s time to head to the shop and buy some supplies. Here you’ll be able to buy Health Potions for your adventure; these will cost you one-hundred gold coins each and you have a starting wallet of one-thousand gold coins. The shopkeeper only ever has health potions to sell but you can collect more health potions as you progress through the game. So, you could save your money and instead head to the Ember Order, where The Grandmaster will offer you various abilities, ten in all. Depending on the ability they rise in price from a couple hundred to a few thousand gold coins.



You will gain more gold as you progress through each level, defeating enemies, finding treasure rooms. You may also come across trap rooms; here you’ll find a treasure chest hanging over a trap. If you decide to try your luck you may gain some gold or health points. Attempting to take the chest may trigger the trap; if this happens then a negative buff will afflict your party. Any gold you may collect can be used in gambling dens, where you can gamble against Orcs. Gambling is simple, you just choose one of three options of one hundred, five hundred and one thousand gold coins. Once you’ve selected an amount it will then let you know if you’ve won or lost. It’s that simple, and like gambling anything you’re more than likely to walk away with nothing than walk away with your pockets full.

You can also spend any gold you find in town, which is reached travelling through a Town Portal. While in town you can use your gold to buy new abilities, replenish health and health potions and even revive fallen party members. Town Portals, Treasure Rooms, Trap Rooms, Shrines or Ember Shards are just some of the rooms you’ll come across. These rooms can be found on your map of the current level you’re on. Many of the rooms may be indicated by a sword hilt, which indicates that an enemy is present; to progress you must defeat them. Other rooms where you’ll encounter enemies are indicated by a bull's skull; here you’ll find Mini Bosses. There is also the Boss, who is at the end of a level and indicated by two cross swords. Defeating this boss will either take you to the next level (if there is one), or you’ll enter a corruption fight.

Each character starts with three abilities and can buy from town or gain more abilities from battles. In total you have slots for ten abilities for each member of your party. You can gain anything from one to ten abilities after defeating enemies which you can then add to your characters. These abilities can be anything from replenishing health, dealing damage, increasing or decreasing accuracy, armour, initiative and many others.

When entering a level, you’ll move from room to room until you reach the Boss, and you can check the type of rooms you’ll enter by looking at the map screen. To move to the next room, you must select the exit on the screen, which is highlighted once you hover your mouse cursor over it. Sometimes it’s easy to see an exit, other times it may just look like a wall in your way, but once you know what you're looking for then it’s easy to spot and there’s always the map which shows which direction the next rooms are.

When battling enemies, mini bosses or the end boss you’ll be able to select any abilities you may have collected, choose to use a health potion, take a defensive posture or attack with your weapon. The abilities all have a cooldown period and these carry over into the next rooms you enter. So use them wisely, especially when entering a room with a boss, as your weapon attack might not be strong enough to deal any kind of damage. After reaching and defeating the levels end boss, if there’s another level you’ll move on to that and continue as you had before. If there are no more levels to compete through, then you’ll enter the Corruption Fight. This is where you’ll control the most corrupted of your party and fight against the other two members, until one remains, after which you’ll have completed that level and then be shown your stats and how well you’ve done. Every ability you learn can corrupt your soul, transforming you into some devil, so beware of the powers you wish to tame.

Battles can be frustrating at times, especially as most of the time they seem to attack one character. This wouldn’t be too bad, but it can lead to that character being left out of the battle completely. Sometimes when a character is attacked, they can learn that ability after they’ve won the battle. However, when one character is constantly attacked, they have multiple abilities against them; at one point I had around twelve abilities on one of my characters, unable to attack. This, coupled with those enemies absorbing the other two’s attacks, means that the battle is going to drag on ‘n on, or everyone’s going to die.

Other times you can’t even get to attack, as the enemies just seem to constantly attack you; again, when up against six enemies it’s extremely hard to even get one attack in on any of the enemies when this happens. It had been a couple minutes into a battle before I could even reply with my first attack. By this time, I was almost out of health, unable to attack or even use health potions (which only restores one hundred health) and it wasn’t long before my game was over. This doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen quite regularly, so maybe some balancing is needed.

There is also a Daily Challenge where you’ll have to complete a Quest, with certain Modifiers, Party Members and Starting Resources. There is a clock which counts down on each day's challenge, so you’ll know if you have time to enter the current day’s challenge. There is also a Leaderboard of the top scores for that day’s challenge.

Apart from the frustrating battles I did have the game freeze up on me several times and had to exit the game. The developer is updating the game and sorting out the problem out, although the game did freeze a couple times after an update, but another update was rolled out and I didn’t have this happen again.

In the options you’ll find Game (Master Seed, Reset Master Seed, Difficulty and Use Tutorial), Audio (Master, Music and Sound Effects volume sliders along with Mute options), Graphics (Resolution and Quality (Low to Ultra) and Hotkeys).

 

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com!


Positives

+ Fun and easy to play
+ Randomly generated dungeons
+ Lots of abilities to play with
+ Updates

Negatives

- Battles can be frustrating
- Game froze several times
- No achievements
- No cards as yet

Review Summary

Can you resist the corruption as you make your way through randomly generated dungeon quests?

Share this review!

Zeepond Rating: 7/10

Video