In my mind, Emberward is exactly what I want a tower defense game to be.
-The ability to build a maze, separately from positioning towers.
-A wide variety of towers to choose from.
-A wide variety of environments and decent variety of enemies, with various effects that change how I think about building my maze/position my towers.
-A few mid-round options that I can do to influence things during the waves, while still having most of the focus on the maze and towers.
It nails all the fundamentals of the genre in a way that I rarely see. Other tower defense games may have severely limited tower placement locations, or only a few ways that I can change the maze. Emberward, with its straightforward dual systems of tiles-as-cards that you can play + towers that you can build and place on top of your tiles (or, often, elsewhere in the environment) allows you a freedom that so many other TD games don't.
The towers themselves are greatly varied as well. You have all the staples; the basic single-target towers, the long range towers, the slowing towers, the aoe towers, and usually you have several different options for those that vary in a few ways (often using a different element). But then you have more unique towers, like the tower that you can feed other towers to power it up, or the tower that can be placed without base tiles and is immune to enemy attacks, or the portal tower that can teleport enemies backwards, or the lava-spreading tower. And every tower you place can be upgraded in one of two different ways, providing you different options to invest in your towers while still keeping things fairly straightforward.
If I had to call out any flaws in Emberward, I would say that if you're a veteran of TD games, there probably isn't that much here you haven't seen before. The tiles-as-cards (and in tetramino shapes) is probably the most interesting baseline thing that it has to offer; beyond that, everything else the game has to offer has already been done somewhere, albeit not in as polished a way as it's seen here. I personally also don't really care for the meta-progression between runs; IMO it feels tacked-on just for the sake of having some sort of progression, and in my mind would be better removed entirely, with some being made baseline and others just cut out entirely.
I could continue raving about the game, but I'll just reiterate that Emberward is, in my mind, *the* archetype of what a tower defense game should be. Its options, both for making mazes and building towers, are all quite easy to understand and use, offering you lots of freedom in how to handle levels while still being just the right amount of restrictive. All future tower defense games I play will be compared directly against Emberward.
