Amberspire

Playing amberspire is odd. My main points of comparison, i expected, would be stuff like frostpunk (citybuilder with interesting events), citizen sleeper (dices as resource game), or even just other citybuilders. But when approaching it from these angles I really struggled with the game. The events never seemed to matter, just affecting your resources; there wasn't really a story to speak of. Making mistakes in my city layout, or even flat out ignoring the dangerous weather of the game didn't really seem to be that punishing, i was never in danger of failing. As far as I can tell you can't fail at all! By the midpoint of the game I was accumulating at least 10 punishment dice a round and just letting the consequences happen. What was the point? And then, it hit me. The problem was I was treating this like a video game, when it was much, much more of an interactive board game. Not because of the dice, although they're certainly part of it; but rather with the fact that the goals and fail states are mostly self-directed. You aren't exploring a living world or solving a set of pre-made challenges, you're working with a complex random system to try and create the perfect machine. Under this framework, a lot of the game makes sense. The factions and events have so much flavor because the world is meant to be a real world the board game is set in. The game not having a huge score system or failstate is about your goals being self directed, about finding joy within your own little construction and optimization. And in this lens it sort of works? It's hard to judge for me because i'm not really that huge on games like this! I think it's quite good at that, the lore and style of the game are really fantastic and i realllly love the ues of funny things as resources. (i'm a fallen london fan, how can i resist). Mostly, I just suggest knowing what you're looking for; this is closer to a single player game of Alien Frontiers then it is to simcity!

Amberspire is rough around the edges and decidedly not for me, but I can't help but praise what it does. There's a growing list of cozy building games with (almost) no goal that I know are someone's jam but not mine personally. Amberspire, however, distinguishes itself with its high concept setting and its interesting dice mechanics. It does provide a goal, which is to generate enough Influence to essentially become central to humanity (for a while, anyway), but you can pursue the goal at your leisure. Let me start with the highlight of my game: about halfway through my playthrough, while developing the most advanced section of my city, a massive amount of fog rolled in, disabling literally every piece of that neighborhood. There is a Fogbreaker building that allows you to clean up fog, but given that I had no nearby infrastructure it wasn't as simple as just plopping it down. I could've abandoned the neighborhood to rot until it sinks into the deteriorating mausoleum it is built on top of, but this was the first real challenge I had all game - I wasn't about to back down. Working through a secondary neighborhood and developing a tertiary one, I slowly built up the infrastructure I needed to place some strategic Fogbreakers, finally removing all but one piece of fog that remained out of reach of all Fogbreakers, a reminder of the terrible blight that fell upon the neighborhood. After it was all done, however, my city was visibly transformed as a result of my actions. It was fun to play through that ordeal and the way the dice work really hones in on that. You can only ever roll 6 dice per turn, so you tend to focus on sections of the city at a time, what I call neighborhoods above. If your construction slows down in one area, just move on to another. The way the city grows becomes organic and interesting, not something that you can ever fully plan out. My main gripe with the game is that the above story was really the only standout during my playthrough. The weather effects largely didn't matter in most cases and my only real challenge was understanding the game's mechanisms and delayed progress due to bad rolls. Which, the lack of direct challenge might be someone else's cup of tea! Just not mine. Other gripes include just how buggy the game got, with game crashes and misplaced dice and weird UI elements. The game also tries to have an air of mystery and intrigue, which works for the dice, which may grant you resources like Glow, Gathering or Ritual, but misses the mark on Events. There are several factions who may have a presence in the city and their concepts are vivid and their descriptions are some of the coolest, breeziest fiction I've ever read, but the event system that often involves them has spartan writing that, in most cases, doesn't evoke that same confident flair. It doesn't help that the event system doesn't have many levers to pull, so most resolutions result in largely similar consequences, making events feels generic. I would've liked just a bit more text to stage each event, or some way to give events more ceremony, as they end up feeling too shallow and quick. Resolution text also feels a bit disconnected, where some resolutions are framed differently than others in a jarring way. Of course most of these gripes feel unfair to a production this small swinging this hard, and I do appreciate the way the system works, loved working through the above challenge, and I am in love with the setting and the various meditations on cities and history. I definitely want to see more of this type of thing that strikes out in a bold direction and uses its mechanics to say things.

I appreciate wholeheartedly the concepts behind this game - the idea of building a city in the ruins of another, how the city organically grows, the frustration of player agency and the strange sense of a timeless far-future - however, after completing one run of the game it's hard for me to imagine playing it ever again. I can totally get behind implementing a frustrating or arbitrary set of mechanics with regards to the concepts above, but in practice I found little emergence or enjoyment in the moments where things didn't go to plan due to a dice roll or random event. The game is too visually and textually sparse to find the moments of failure or friction very interesting - I found little incentive to really narrativise what was happening in the city beyond the game mechanics, and the 3 visiting species/factions I encountered in my session were far too lightly sketched and mechanically indifferent to really add much interest. I can't see there being a significant variation in the gameplay, or the narrative that emerges from it, from session to session, which feels like a shame given all the work that has gone into the worldbuilding, art, dice mechanics, and music, which are all very nicely put together with a specific and engaging sensibility. I got about 10 hours of gameplay out of it, which is not bad for the price of the game - but this was mostly because I was determined to complete the game and ended up fairly joylessly grinding out the last few levels - which I don't think is the intention. If there was 20% more story text, and a little more customisation of each city session (where each faction lives, for example, or policies you could adopt, or story-specific locations), I think this could start to be a really interesting game.

This is a recommend but with a big asterisk. I love city builders, and while this is definitely one of those, it's so stripped back that it doesn't allow for any kind of player expression through the design of the city itself. If you don't care about that, you'll probably love this. Personally, while I do like it, it just feels like a city builder with a massive chunk missing. I wish there were more ways to personalise it, since as you can see from the screenshots, everything just looks so brown. It's an interesting world with good design, but after an hour or so I'm so bored of looking at my city I need to go and play something else!

I've been following the progress of Amberspire for a while, and I was excited to see what was to come from what this game appeared to promise. The conceit of a city-building game where you build on the ruins of failed civilisations was alluring to me. The art is evocative as well. Unfortunately, upon execution, Amberspire left me feeling more like a witness than a participant in the rise and fall of its societies. Once I got past Amberspire's aesthetics, I didn't find gameplay that made me want to stick with the game. The developers of Amberspire opted to implement an in-game manual that players can use as a reference for most mechanics in the game. The manual is rich in information, but the search for information that covered the minutae at play became grating. I'm no stranger to playing games that you learn over a long period of time. Many of those games rely on dice rolls and RNG, just like Amberspire does. However, games like Civilisation or Europa Universalis find ways to make you feel like your thumb is on the scale of history, that your input matters. Amberspire places dice rolls front and center as its main mechanic, having you literally roll some dice to determine what you can do next turn. Apparently it's there's a limit on the amount of abstraction that I can tolerate because I didn't feel like my actions were really my own, beyond clicking a button to cast a die. My successes didn't feel impactful, and neither did my failures. I was just sort of there, unsure of what role I was supposed to be playing beyond initiating a dice roll. I don't often write negative reviews, and I want to stress that I believe my feelings on Amberspire are about my tastes and what I look for in city-builders and strategy games vs what Lunar Division has offered in return, rather than a condemnation of the game itself. At the end of the day I'm glad that games like this are being made, even if I don't gel with them, because I would hate to see the day that the idea of what a strategy game can be is deemed to be "settled."

Worth the price of admission just to experience it. not necessarily a city builder that will slurp up hundreds or thousands of hours, but unique, emotive, and enjoyable. The art style is lovely, the sound design is great, very calming, and no matter how the game goes it's fun to solve the problems and watch the city evolve (or devolve) based on choices and rolls. I do heartily recommend this game even with flaws because it is extremely novel, enjoyable, and cool. However if you want to read my suggestions for some improvements, keep reading. Otherwise, just buy it and have a good time. I sure did. There are some QoL things I'd love to see the devs fix so i could enjoy playing it more long-term. 1. Weather tracker - in my first game the weather changed with some frequency, but in my second game it was nothing but Fog the entire time lol. The most difficult kind of weather to manage. It provided a unique challenge but it was quite frustrating. Thankfully my first game had gone very smoothly so i was looking for a challenge. But overall I don't know if this was a bug or intentional, and it'd be nice to be able to see when the weather is going to change. 2. Dim or change the highlighting. When you mouse over a building, it darkens the map that is outside that building's reachable distance. It does this for every building you mouse over, which means on a big bright monitor you can be flashing dark and light repeatedly and rapidly, which causes a kind of painful strobing for those of us with sensitive vision (and i imagine everyone else too). I'd rather see the radius i can reach glow rather than everything else darken, or be outlined with a bright colour. Alternatively, the darkening could happen when i hold a button over the building, rather than by default. 3. Rephrase the game end--you can either continue playing or "build on the ruins of your previous city" which sounded cool! But that basically means start a fresh game. When i chose to build atop my old city, i was simply returned to the main menu. I wanted to be able to keep going on the same moonscape, assuming i would see fresh holes, different weather, and possibly some different extant buildings. I think with a NG+ mode like that, the game would have a longer lifecycle for play. 4. Options. There basically aren't any, which is mostly fine, but I think some difficulty sliders would be fun. I found that once i got tier 6 (endgame) it did not last very long. I wanted to experience a bit more of the new buildings I'd gotten to. Overall though, great game.

Summary: looks beautiful, gently-paced with a board game feel and the promise of deep, strategic gameplay. Definitely a game I'll spend more time with. I enjoy isometric city builders and loved how this was presented, so it was a day 1 purchase for me. So far, I've spent 3+ hours in the game, and I'll certainly be spending more time with it. It took me a little while to get the hang of spawning and rolling multiple dice to get resources and resolve situations - this mechanic slows down gameplay to a meditative pace. Amberspire has a board-game feel to it, and I can see how as I progress, I will have interesting decisions to make about how to optimise my city. So far, I've only had a limited number of interactions with other factions, so that aspect has a fairly light touch in the early game, compared with learning how to build my city and keep various threats at bay. I'll be interested to see how aligning myself with some of these factions plays out longer term. Within my game, I've managed to upgrade to a new level and unlock new building types and resources fairly easily and am curious to see what's next - the buildings and world so far are imaginitive and thoughtfully designed.

I asked for a review copy of this because digital games based on euro-style board games are very much my bag. I played this for a few hours on stream and I absolutely love it, and will be coming back to it again. It gives me all of the feel of a dice-drafting game like Roll for the Galaxy without having to organise to play an actual board game with people. The flavour of the world is fantastic and exactly what the art style suggests (Dune via Moebius, if a bit more optimistic). I also appreciate that the game is mostly about trying your best to be a benevolent ruler, it veers away quite far from the Frostpunk tone of "being kind is foolish"; for example you can't just demolish homes to build whatever you want, which feels a little bit utopian while also making for interesting spatial puzzles. Music and general mood is great. I had a few small UX quibbles; camera is a little bit unruly and I'd like some of the highlights/helper text etc. to fade in quickly - moving the mouse around rapidly over different things is a bit painful on the eyes and makes the game difficult to watch on a stream etc. These are small and didn't stop me enjoying it or recommending it (although I hope they do get patched). More digital implementations of eurogame ideas please!

Very interesting take on city builders, heavily inspired by board games and the idea that you shouldn't always be in control of the outcome of your planning. Risk/reward factors heavily into your decisionmaking! And the vibes are immaculate.

This is a neat game, quite similar to slipways. Gorgeous art, definitely feels like more of a puzzle/board game than a city builder.