Amberspire

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.

You will probably have more fun with Against the Storm (2021), Frostpunk (2018), or Surviving Mars (2018). However, you will not see this game's bold ideas in those more accessible and enduring competitors. This review is more negative than positive, but the game is more of a trailblazing prototype than an outright failure. If you are a genre aficionado and want to see something new, consider Amberspire despite its faults. The game is designed to disrupt play, full of obstacles to optimal runs. Even if you like planning around setbacks, other games do it better; it can be frustrating to get hit with bad weather, destroyed buildings, and lose/lose event choices with such limited prevention or damage control options. You get Instability if you demolish a completed structure, a mechanic which incentivizes building on your previous layout rather than freely deleting buildings. But if an event destroys a structure, you get the Instability penalty for that too. Often this means that when the building is lost, so is the surface beneath it, preventing you from rebuilding. This makes perfect diegetic sense — removing a building destabilizes the fragile lunar surface even if it's not your choice — but it's also typical of the "kick in the balls plus a kick in the balls" event system, which at times will charge you Influence (a global resource and advancement requirement) to lose Influence. Yet there are also events that will dump huge amounts of Influence in your lap, when ordinarily Influence is hard-won, bit by bit, with painstakingly-assembled sets of buildings. Weather dice that create hazardous terrain are a disincentive to production, especially in the case of buildings with more weather faces on their dice, like the Furnace or the Garden. Event points are a hazard too; usually you are trying to build up Influence and could lose it all in an event. Advanced buildings usually have more event point results, so after building that nice new cutting-edge facility, you have a gameplay reason to idle it in favor of your safer basic buildings. Given that you can only roll six dice per turn anyway, was disincentivizing production with poison die faces necessary? The dice were already capable of delivering bad results in the form of resources for which you had less or no use. You can't fight the terrain too hard in this game. Some hazards have to be left in place or else you'll roll extra weather dice that create more hazards. It's not like taming the map in Timberborn (2021). You can see some Conway's Game of Life inspiration in how the hazards grow and move, which is kind of neat, but not terribly consequential. As far as functional gameplay is concerned, hazards appear in localized blobs, and if it's a lot of hazard, it's easiest to just play around it, while more limited hazards can be addressed by building and supplying a hazard-clearing facility in range. Either way, the exact layout and movement of the hazard is a minor visual detail, not something you can hack by disrupting its Conway pattern. Because it's so stripped-down, the game often feels more like a puzzle board than a city-builder (especially because resources you produce have to be consumed locally, within a restrictive radius of the building they're from, making positionality extremely important). This is not necessarily a problem, but I think the core mechanic of buildings with unpredictably variable output types could be better explored in a more holistic city-builder. Creating fork areas where multiple possible outputs from a building can be put to good local use is (I think) novel gameplay for the genre. The resources are mysterious and their relationships are typically not intuitive, but their interactions are fundamental to the design. A more familiar setting with more familiar resources might still be counterintuitive anyway because the underlying mechanics follow their own logic. ("Why can't I build a Firehouse with Timbers?") Presumably the building dependencies got diagrammed out for math and system reasons rather than the logic of the setting, since every dice resource is produced by exactly two building types, which would be unlikely in a naturalistic model. Visually excellent, with ligne claire graphics and muted, weird colors. As is often the case, it looks best zoomed in but you'll mostly play zoomed out. Some minor issues: - If rust grows next to residential, it functions properly, deleting the rust and the platform beneath it. But if residential grows next to rust, the rust doesn't trigger. - When starting a new game, the previous game's Influence may be displayed in the interface instead. Earning Influence fixes it. - "Multplier" in building tooltips should be "Multiplier" instead. - Occasional performance hitches. - Why does the event result "Dais enjoyed greater influence" sharply reduce the political power of Dais? - Ideally there'd be a settings option to make dice rolling and allocation results display instantly or very fast. If the game had more staying power, this would be essential for long-term players. - The Scrapyard takes a long time to build because unlike other buildings it accepts only a single resource which gives only a single build point out of six. Its benefit is also rather small (you could just place a new Landing Pad instead; you need the population for advancement requirements anyway). An odd building to give the player, especially so early in the game. It might make sense as a building for an expansion area you'll prioritize later, except that in the time it takes to build it, hazards and tile loss may considerably reduce the viability of that area. Also it's got an inconveniently large footprint. - City tier icon doesn't change when you upgrade. I guess it doesn't have to, but it seems like it ought to have visible stages. - Knocking you down a whole city tier from events is... kind of interesting, actually, gives you an interlude where you can't place your newest buildings and have to work around that. But the Influence cost is nasty; you're effectively crippled until you pay a massive Influence ransom, and it's very easy to lose all your Influence in events when you're trying to build it up. - A dev diary talks about rendering the 2D building graphics in a sliced, tile-by-tile way, and incidentally mentions that this rules out partial transparency for individual pixels. I'm not sure why it would. - The dev diaries conceptually rule out multiple symbols on a single die face, but event points appear via an additional symbol on the die face. I don't think this is bad design, but the design principle is not borne out. - Contrary to how the dev diaries describe it, the city doesn't start around a spire. It starts around a shaft or pit. Ambershaft or Amberpit are not as euphonious as Amberspire, though. Long live the spire (that's actually a hole in the ground). Edit: I forgot to mention how population works. You temporarily need nearby population buildings to build a new building, which monopolizes their building potential until the construction is finished or deleted. (You can delete an unfinished building without penalty. You also need to hit certain total population requirements for advancement. Other than this, your residents don't exist. They don't belong to the factions (a faction can leave without reducing population), they don't have non-construction jobs, and they don't need or desire goods. You could argue that this is abstracted into marketplace buildings and the Influence system and from there even to events, but it's so disconnected from population that you will bring in more residents without any concern for how they will directly impact the balance of goods, which is odd for a city-builder. (Also, I never built a Starport and don't know why I'd want one instead of a Landing Pad. By the time you can build Starports you probably have all the population you need via Landing Pads getting Bricks from Kilns.)

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!

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'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.

Amberspire is every bit a Lunar Division game, leaning into many of the same distinctive choices that were also made by their previous title, The Banished Vault. The most dramatic of these for the casual player is the game's manual, which is nearly 100 pages long and which you are strongly recommend to refer to when getting started. Fortunately, the manual is available as an in-game menu, but Lunar Division clearly trust that their players are not afraid of a little reading. You do not need to read the whole manual, but you should certainly read the front sections that describe the overall rules and objectives. Once you finish the tutorial and settle in, Amberspire feels like a game with board game sensibilities that couldn't possibly exist as a physical board game. Some buildings give you a die to roll, but you can only roll a handful of dice each turn. Depending on the resources those dice yield, you might be able to add to a construction project in progress, or might be able to trade the result away at a marketplace building for "influence," or feed them to yet other buildings to grow your city's population. The half-dozen buildings you start with exist in a simple rock-paper-scissors relationship with one another, and when you have enough population and influence, you can advance your city to its next "rank," granting access to new buildings. The game has no antagonists as such, although your city will come to have factions that you should try to keep happy. Most hostility instead comes from the moon itself, which is full of "weather" (all of it bad) and is also slowly falling apart (resulting in growing voids in the landscape). The more dice you roll, the more weather you have to contend with. Rolling more dice also triggers more story events from the local factions, which are occasionally good but often provide setbacks. Thus, gameplay involves managing the spreading weather, growing your population and influence, and navigating story beats as your city reaches each rank milestone. Like many board games that can be played solo (Leder Games' "Oath" comes to mind), this game does not _really_ tell a story in the traditional sense. It is instead an elaborate system of interconnected mechanics that are tied together by a coherent theme. The pleasure is in putting those pieces together into an efficient machine that pays for itself, even as the world tries to knock it off balance. This gives it a very tactile "just one more turn" feel that I have more often experience with 4X strategy games, and it's nice to get that feeling without also managing fleets and armies. There are, however, a number of small wrinkles. The interface is slightly janky (some info boxes spilled off screen, and sometimes the game would lose track of which building a die had come from until I shuffled them around a bit), and some buildings proved much more useful than others, at least how I played. However, this did not obstruct my overall enjoyment. The strong theme, ligne-claire art style, and just-one-more-turn pacing made this an easy game to pick up for 15 minutes or get engrossed in for several hours.

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!