Winter Ember Review (Xbox Series S)

by Jim Smale · May 25, 2022

This Winter Ember Review will have us taking on an immersive stealth action game that casts us into the role of Arthur Artorias, the faceless man. Step into the shadows and uncover a mysterious plot that saw your family torn from the history books. On the first night of winter, you unsheath your blade and seek vengeance.

Winter Ember Review Pros:

Decent graphics.
5.9GB download size.
1000 Gamerscore.
Controller settings – Invert axis and sensitivity sliders along with the ability to rebind the buttons.
Six save slots.
Four difficulties – Easy, medium, hard and faceless man.
Cool cartoon cutscenes.
Can skip cutscenes.
Fully voiced characters.
Stealth gameplay.
Opening tutorial section with ongoing pop-ups.
Combat is heavily sword-based with dodges, parrying, and charge attacks the order here.
Full camera control.
Light plays a huge part as it’s all about stealth and sight, you can use the light to your advantage or simply extinguish the light.
Multiple ways to pass an objective.
Assassinate or knock out enemies.
You can hide bodies.
Pickpocket enemies or loot dead bodies.
With doors, you can peek through the keyhole and see what’s on the other side and pan the camera around.
Shrines are used for saving and act as checkpoints.
Loot cupboards, chests, etc.
Bleeding will allow enemies to track you, scare locals and make your attacks weaker.
Lock pick mini-game.

Winter Ember Review Cons:

The performance is quite bad with a lot of slowdowns and juddering.
The controls feel floaty.
Cutscenes are not smooth.
Performance impacts the fluidity of combat and makes it very mashy and frustrating.
They do a whole lighting thing where the overall screen dims and lights up depending on your location, at first you think cool but after a short, while it becomes a real pain in the ass and makes a hard-to-play game even harder.
Slow-paced.
Little in the way of settings for anything like video, performance, or effects.
You can only go into cover in certain parts and it is shown with a huge icon every time.
Jumping onto ledges is a mission in itself as you can just jump on any old crate, jump down and you immediately enter stealth.
No help with guidance.
No tutorials for things like lock picking or why you should loot normal household items.
Hard to see the enemies.
Levels look huge but are actually very small with unclimbable boxes or doors that don’t open to keep you encased.
Lock picks break on every attempt so it’s very easy to just waste your stockpile.
So many icons and flashing items everywhere.
Hard to read the health bar system.