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The Story of Emberwind

The kingdom of Grendale is being invaded by gremlins and it is up to you to save the day. You are Kindle, the only fire gnome amongst the gnomes of Grendale and the local watchman. With the help of your inventions and your snow owl friend, Wick, you can achieve this.

The Review: What is Emberwind?

Emberwind is an action platformer that has Super Nintendo written all over it. You go around and whack gremlins with your staff, unlock new moves and abilities, collect gems and other treasures and save the people of Grendale by lighting lamps and fireplaces to scare away and destroy the gremlins. As you progress, you increase your health by acquiring treasure and your strength by finding and freeing hidden fairies on each level. Every now and then, if you look hard enough, you can also unlock a new move which will allow you to jump further or higher, avoid taking damage, discover new ways to deal damage, or move faster.

Emberwind is incredibly polished. The graphics are old school and if I didn’t know better, I’d swear the game is from the Super Nintendo. The sprites are drawn nicely, the characters have great animations and there really is nothing about the look of the game you could complain about.

The music of Emberwind is orchestral and atmospheric, and it makes you feel heroic from the beginning to the end. The sounds fit the characters well, and none of it is bothersome like in some other games. Again, the game sounds like it should belong on a 16-bit console and this is a major plus for me.

The basic premise of Emberwind is simple. You get an objective for each level which you need to complete while scoring as many points and finding as many secrets as possible, and then you return to your owl and leave the level. At the end of each area, there is a boss, and you also get a flying level here and there. It’s really worth it to find as many secrets you can, since points give you extra health bubbles, while other collectibles increase your strength and other abilities. The game also tracks your time for each level, and you can revisit previous levels to beat your old records, which will also grant you extra points.

The Verdict

All in all, Emberwind is a great and polished game, definitely worth playing.

Score: 9/10

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The Review: What is Hammerfight?

Wow, this one actually surprised me! When I read that Hammerfight a physics game where you use mouse gestures to control your character, I expected an interesting gimmick that will grow old fast and just get in the way of the game. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

In Hammerfight, you control a flying vehicle with a huge weapon attached to it, usually a boulder on a chain or something similar. You use your mouse to move and to swing your weapon around and hit stuff. Now, this might sound a bit tedious, but it really works great. The physics are on point and it really does feel like you are actually hitting stuff. I have played the game for a few levels and, while it is hard, it never felt like it was hard because of the controls.

I didn’t get far enough, but it also seems that, later on, you get to customize your flying machine and weapons with various gems. Even without this, the game feels fun, but I have to say, I’m looking forward to that part.

The visuals and the story of Hammerfight are another great plus. The story seems detailed and interesting, the graphics look decent, with lots of attention to detail, and the music creates a great atmosphere. There are places in the game where you can chose which way to go, which also adds some replayability. In any case, a fun game. I recommend!

The Verdict

Score: 8.5/10

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The Review

Ancient Trader plays more like a board game than anything else. You select a scenario, each with different winning conditions, start with a small ship and begin trading. You go from port to port, buy low and then sell high, all while collecting treasure, fighting mythical sea creatures and avoiding or defeating other captain’s. You can get quests from ports for extra cash, buy some powerful artifacts and upgrades your ship’s weapons, cargo hold and speed.

Ancient Trader also quite pretty, and everything looks like a hand drawn ancient map. The effects are fine and the music fits well with the package.

Sounds fun, right? Well, not so much. You see, Ancient Trader is extremely simplified. You only have three types of merchandise, only three types of weapons which follow a rock – paper – scissor system, and that’s about it. Once you complete a single map, you’ve pretty much seen everything there is to see. Now, the game does support hotseat multiplayer, so that might be fun, but that’s about it. It’s pirates diluted to the point of not being fun anymore, at least not for me.

I know people hate that word, but I think an accurate description would be to say that the game is extremely “casualized”.

The Verdict

Score: 5/10, maybe 7/10 if hotseat turns out to be fun.

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Devil’s Tuning Fork

I downloaded this free game because I found the concept interesting. Basically, you are blind and you use a tuning fork to navigate around the world from a first person perspective. You use the left mouse button to fire a high frequency sound which then bounces of walls and outlines the area around you, or you can use a slower frequency sound with the right mouse button in order to detect weak floors and stuff like that. You can also use a charged up sound which is then fired to an area you target and then it spreads from there. This is used to outline distant areas or trigger bells and stuff like that.

Anyway, it’s an interesting concept, which looks great, but I’m not really sure how good the game is. It feels more like a novelty than anything else. There is a story somewhere in there to, and it seems to be scary or something, but I didn’t really feel it, as it’s to abstract.

Rogue Survivor

A zombie survival roguelike, of all things. Again, I’ve found this to be an interesting concept, but it’s still really early in development so it feels a bit cumbersome to play. Still, this looks like it could become the next minecraft/dwarf fortress if done well. I haven’t played it to much, but I will definitely follow it along.

Well, as you see, I decided to do something about my lack of playing games lately. I will try to find a cool game every now and then to “review” and even provide a link if the game is free. There are really some gems out there that should be discovered by more people so hopefully, a couple more will discover them thanks to a post here.

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Hardware issues, exams, Cataclysm released… I’m sorry to say, but this time, the only reason I haven’t been posting on this blog is because I really haven’t played anything other than WoW for ages.

Two days ago, I finally tried one new game – Super Meat Boy. It’s pretty cool and fun, extremely funny, but not something I intend to finish to fast. The levels are short and fast-paced, so the game is perfect when you have a few minutes to kill. I managed to complete one world and a few levels on the next one, but that’s about it.

Super Meat Boy Character Art

It’s Super Meat Boy!

Other than that, I played nothing, really. I tried a few games, but nothing of note or worth writing about. Since I also won’t be seriously playing anything for a while, I’m thinking about adding some other content to the blog. Maybe I will do some reviews or info on various indie games not many know about. We shall see…