Yay for GemCraft!

I must apologise for being a bit gushy about this game, but it is simply awesome fun. At one point I did end up playing this both on my home and work PCs...which might be considered a bit obsessive.


GemCraft - Chapter One: The Forgotten

So...micro-review (as my mini-reviews never seem to happen):

At the basic level this is a strategic tower defence game based on the standard model of building towers at certain location along a set path in an attempt to defend a location from successive waves of enemies.

GemCraft also gives you some other brilliant elements though, taking far beyond the basic framework. The main break with the traditional mold is that you aren't really building the towers but the gems which power them. Think of it as the same way as choosing whether to put a flamethrower or a rocket launcher turret on an emplacement. You can create new emplacements anywhere on the grid based levels by casting one of the 8 spells you have access to...each charging you mana.

First up with have building your character, slapping you round the face with a pleasant level of RPG-ness which multiplies the depth of the game many times over. Get to a million points, and you get additional point to distribute among a number of different skills, eg making your shots do more damage, or gaining more reward for each kill.

You also get achievements for doing certain things in each level, like killing 80+ enemies...or creating fifty new gems. Though they lack the incentive of other in game achievements (Mass Effect and Stormwinds 2.5) which give you an actual bonus for getting them, it's always nice to think that you're doing something right in a level and adds a sense of replaying it in a different way to get a different result.

There's also target scores on each level, getting a certain number of these will unlock hidden bonus levels. It really is like Game In A Bottle is trying to cram as many features as they can come up with into a single game and yet they still all manage to gel into a cohesive whole.

Game In A Bottle have used the same elements in a lot of work but they still manage to blend these successfully with each new game.

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I found exciting news about this series earlier...the prequel is in the works and at the point of being screenshot-able. Hurrah!. You can read it here, should you be an addict to the game like myself.