I had been playing some GemCraft Chasing Shadows - a fun little tower defense game, sequel of a flash game I used to play a while ago - when I noticed that there had been another one of these that I hadn’t tried out, since I am a big fan I gave it a shot! I had a good time with it, but I ultimately couldn’t sink the time or effort required to complete the game because at some point it just became too tough for me and looking at videos or tutorials to beat every level I had issues with wasn’t part of my plans. Still a really interesting tower defense game!
Starting the game, I picked the ‘normal’ difficulty, something that I had to walk back pretty early on; The game is fairly simple, you have to protect your Orb from monsters going through a path. To do so, you socket gems into towers, traps and other buildings, and the gems fire at the enemies. There are six types of gems in GCFW, and they all have their special effects. To create gems and build structures, you accumulate mana, both by killing enemies and replenishing it over time. You can combine gems together to increase their tier and effects and need to be strategic, build mazes and block paths while using the right gems to defeat enemies with their own special effects - they can have armor, come into large swarms, or do other things.
For your victories, you’ll get experience, shadow cores and unlock new skills and maps to go through. You can redo fights with difficulty multipliers to get more experience if you want - you can also increase the difficulty with special modifiers to get more rewards - something I did a lot in the previous games but couldn’t do it here because I could barely beat the levels as-is - and there are three modes for each map, one of which is more of a puzzle and doesn’t use your unlocked skills and powers in order to focus more on using the right tools for the job. They can be fun, but also frustrating. Skills have a range of effects and you have to balance between spending your points and increasing your mana bonus at the start of each map - which is based on your unspent skills.
To further improve yourself, you have puzzle fragments that you can upgrade, change shape and place across a board that you progressively unlock by spending shadow cores. This system is neat, and finding rare and powerful puzzle pieces can be a good feeling, but at the same time, after a while I just got with my board and didn’t really want to change anything in fear of losing precious bonuses that I needed to struggle by.
The game is also a bit difficult in spots, for no apparent reason and with no logical way of figuring out why it is. Sometimes if you don’t built just right for the first few waves, you’ll get quickly overwhelmed and fight a losing battle. Sometimes you’ll get to five rounds before the end and your strategy just won’t work anymore. It’s unclear why this happens, I didn’t have that problem in the previous title and it’s not very fun here. Is it because I don’t have enough starting mana? I’m choosing the wrong gems? Building at the wrong spot? Even on the ‘easy’ difficulty I frequently got stuck, and this is what ultimately made me stop.
I really enjoyed GemCraft - Frostborn Wrath, there are a lot of things I didn’t talk about that make its mechanics pretty complex and deep, but really after playing the previous game and managing to do pretty much everything, I feel like this new entry is a bit too difficult for me. Still pretty good! If you enjoy Tower Defense games, I’d give this one a shot, they’re not that common anymore.
