You may have heard of the developers at Runewaker. They've made such games as Runes of Magic and Dragon's Prophet. Well they've just recently released a new game, Guardians of Ember with several editions of varying prices on Steam. It's being described as a mix of a Hack and Slash type game like Diablo and traditional MMORPGs. Let's take a closer look at what all that intel's. This is our Guardians of Ember review.
You may have heard of the developers at Runewaker. They've made such games as Runes of Magic and Dragon's Prophet. Well they've just recently released a new game, Guardians of Ember with several editions of varying prices on Steam. It's being described as a mix of a Hack and Slash type game like Diablo and traditional MMORPGs. Let's take a closer look at what all that intel's. This is our Guardians of Ember review.
Let's look at the basics. Guardians of Ember gives you four different races to pick from (races are purely cosmetic with no special skills or stats). There are Humans, Elves, male Dwarves and the female Naia. It should be noted that there is a decent amount of customization in the game for looks to start with, not Black Desert Online level but good none the less. From there you choose between six different classes.
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- Dark Knight – A damage oriented tank like class all about physical damage, shadow magic and poison magic.
- Knight – A holy magic user focusing on heavy tanking and physical damage.
- Ranger –A ranged DPS class with some nature magic.
- Engineer – A ranged support/DPS class with traps and turrets.
- Priest – A support class with healing magic and holy damage.
- Mage – A ranged DPS specializing in elemental magic.
For the purposes of this review I played both a Dark Knight and a Mage.
Right off the bat I could feel a difference between my Mage and Dark Knight. My knight would just go through whole packs of mobs with his skills laying waste fairly quickly. Meanwhile my Mage felt like a slower damage dealer with the cooldown on my skills making it harder to kill things. Add in that some skills which would damage mobs in a straight line would sometimes hit things off my screen and at times I was getting more than I thought attacking me. Occasionally the hit box was off a but with line type skills. Your basic skill is connected to your left mouse button as your basic attack. You start out with three different ones to pick from with the ability at each level up to upgrade them in some way (+% to hit, etc.) with milestones at the third level increase that offer a new skill unlock. Most all of the basic attacks offer an energy regen mechanic built in as well. You also gain abilities to use on your right mouse button, these use up your energy to use. But wait there's more! You unlock skills to place on your 1-4 keys that can do varying things on a longer cooldown than basic skills. At this point you can begin see the similarity to Diablo type games now. Oh, and there's one more thing, at level 15 you can multiclass. That helps to open up even more skill variety and choice for the character you're playing.
You like items you say? Well good, because there's quite a few in Guardians of Ember. From random drops off of normal mobs, to quest rewards, to boss drops and crafting. You can enchant items as well. I felt crafting would be more useful towards higher level since loot was so plentiful as I was leveling, but it's always nice to have that choice. Guardians of Ember decided to go the route of allowing every class to be able to use anything. So, while it did look odd for my mage to be casting a spell with a crossbow, it was still a thing I could do if the weapon had good stats. While we're talking about items, we should also talk about player housing system. You can decorate your house and have a sprite there. I only dabbled in it as it felt like it could have been more fleshed out than it was.
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But what about that mix of traditional MMORPG? That is supposed to come in regards to other people playing around you and/or in dungeons. I'm unsure if just not a lot of people were playing when I was or just no one was trying to do the dungeons I was. For a game just recently released it felt underpopulated. The features are there to make it more MMO like with PvE and PvP content. But it should be stressed this is most definitely a hack and slash type game before it's an MMORPG. I did appreciate the randomized dungeons aspect of the game. There are quests all over to keep you busy with promises from the dev team for more story and quests and more everything.
Overall, I enjoyed my experience in Guardians of Ember, it can be a fun romp especially if you like this type of game. But I feel by trying to combine several things into one, the game may have been too diluted.
