Orebound

Orebound is a voxel, automation, factory, building and mining game. Players experience the game as a dwarf tasked by their king to find the Emberstone, the ultimate treasure for dwarves. They are sent to the distant edges of the kingdom where they must craft, build, mine and defend themselves from enemies while they look for this stone.

The game releases October 24th, but a demo allows players to get a sneak peek into the world. Although it starts off with an air balloon ride with little to do but admire the scenery, the game picks up from there with a wide range of options for meeting the goal of the game.

Beautiful Graphics

While Orebound doesn’t have award winning graphics for clarity and sharpness, they are nonetheless very beautiful, especially for this type of game. The graphics provide a decent level of detail, and the background is filled with items and interesting things to look at.

Movement and animation are all simple but smooth, making the game’s appearance overall very beautiful. While it’s not quite as spectacular as a similar dwarf mining game, the popular The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria it has its own unique appeal. One part of the game that could be improved is the addition of different perspectives, as the game can only be played in first person at this time.

Basic Survival Game

The game starts out like just about any basic building game. Players need to gather resources and use them to create their first buildings. Once this is established, they’re free to continue solving the games problems until they’ve reached the main goal. There is combat in the game, with players taking on small beasts like wild boar at first, and then moving on to Orcs and even bosses as time progresses. Most of the bosses can be handled by preparing well with upgraded weapons. The voxel based landscape really shines here, allowing players to build or dig virtually anywhere to create their ideal base.

Early Release for a Reason

The developer has chosen to release Orebound as an “Early Release” rather than a full game. The reason they cite is, “The Emberforge realizes that Orebound is an epic task. We want to continue to hammer the games development anvil into new areas and that will take significant time.”

In truth, the game at this time still needs some hammering. A few people who have played the game have already found a few bugs. At one point, even to the point of giving the player inadvertent access to all the items in the game. Fortunately, the developers work relatively quickly to fix most errors. If a bug is encountered, it’s likely that reporting it will result in the bug being fixed as quickly as possible.

Players have also jumped on the bandwagon asking for quality of life improvements, such as being able to see how much they have of different items in the build screen.

Pros:

• Beautiful Graphics
• Voxel world gives plenty of freedom
• Active developers

Cons:

• Some bugs
• In need of basic quality of life improvements