GemCraft is great, I remember the old days when I actually paid for the complete version of such a game on Kongregate, something that was unheard of for me back in that time - paying for flash games - but it's a nice tower defense game that might last you a long while. There's so much stuff in it and it all is based on solid core mechanics and titular gems. It's not an entirely flawless game, but after you get over some bumps in difficulty and some clunky UI, you'll have a solid game to keep you playing and unlock stuff, level, and get better at it.
The first levels of the game are tutorials for each system - new and old - you have different ranks of gems with different abilities, like poison, reducing armor, critical strikes, and so forth, and you use mana to make gems. You can then place these gems into towers or traps, towers attack your enemies, traps amplify the special abilities of the gems but deal low damage. You can then upgrade your gems or combine them for mana. Enemies move through a maze that you can complement with walls of your own in order to attack your orb. When they do, you lose mana, if you run out, you lose. You can throw 'gem bombs', you can use skills on enemies and on your gems, there are amplifiers that you can build to boost your towers, etc. etc.
For beating enemies and completing levels, you get shadow cores - the currency of the game, if this was a f2p game you could buy it with real money, but as it is you only get it from playing, I'm a bit conflicted on shadow cores since I've been playing for a long while and I've never found anything I felt was worth to buy with them, everything is so expansive - you also get talisman fragments, which you slot into a big talisman to customize the way you play. You can level these fragments and recycle them if you find better ones. You also have many skills that you improve by leveling up, and unused skill points are converted into starting mana. From progressing in the game, you also find Battle Traits to increase the experience you win from a level by making the enemies more difficult in some ways. All of these things work together pretty amazingly.
That being said, I feel that the interface is acting weird sometimes, dragging gems around and they just get dropped without me releasing the mouse, not snappy enough. But you'll need to learn the various keyboard shortcuts to properly use skills and control the speed enemies are coming in. You also can throw bombs at enemy wave markers to make them more difficult if a level is going too smoothly. My biggest issue I have with the game right now is the weird balance. Before you get enough levels to start with a truckload of mana, maps can be decided in the first wave or two. Either you have enough resources to build the towers required to kill the first few waves, or they just crash into your orb and you lose very quickly without apparent ways to win. But if you play some more, redo old maps to get more experience, you'll get to a point where you start powerful enough to go back and crush these challenges.
The game throws plenty of stuff at you - maps where you have to freeze enemies and kill them nearby special structures, beacons that buff enemies, shrines where you can drop gems to activate special effects, challenge maps where you don't have your skills and talisman, forcing you to fight with gems alone, maps where you can't build towers - only traps, enemies that split into more enemies, shields, ghosts, wizard towers that kill you if you don't break the seals before the last waves, there's so much stuff to do. And when you've cleared the game on easy difficulty, there are two more waiting for you, with more occasions to level up and get better talisman pieces.
GemCraft - Chasing Shadows is a game that I'll continue playing long after this review goes online, it's a good tower defense game with tons of stuff and it all works pretty well together. You'll just need to bear for a little while if the going gets too tough in some levels!
