GemCraft - Frostborn Wrath

I enjoyed the difficulty curve, and the challenging trials. Typically, brute force doesn't solve any challenge, but creative use of walls, traps, amplifiers and towers will. However, the artifcat, and endurance challenges force a hard grind. The artifact provides wonderful bonuses towards the game in non-trial modes, but requires another resource, shadow orbs, to power up. You get maybe a few hundred after a single play of an average level. To power up the artifact, requires around a hundred thousand shadow orbs, and this is before dealing with the different levels of its pieces. A high level piece (80+) can require an additional ten thousand or so to completely power up. You want to do this, as it gives you free skill points and nice damage bonuses. The high level pieces come from breaking open vaults or ramping up the difficulty on replaying a level. The vaults reach high levels of ridicuolusness in toughness. A million health and armor, really? Even with my high number of hours of play, I'm not any where close to unlocking the artifact completely or upgrading each piece completely. To conclude It is fair to play through and beat. Don't try to 100% it.

hours of fun, but it can be really tricky to get the right combination and orders of gems in the tower.

GemCraft is a tower defense game. As other reviews have mentioned, the game offers a lot of flexibility in how you set up defenses. There are gems you can slot into defenses with a variety of effects (increased mana, critical hits, armor-breaking...) different kinds of buildings that will change how those gems interact, a huge skill tree. You can build walls to try to send the swarms on an optimal path, even pause and re-route the enemy flow, given mana and time. All of this was in previous GemCraft games. There are some additions, like lanterns, and probably more I have yet to see. I don't know if I ever will, however. Because the vast majority of the changes that have been made arbitrarily and gratuitously make the game harder, with no real benefit to the player unless they're the sort who really enjoys repeating the same sequence over and over again to minimal benefit. To be clear, this goes way beyond "grinding". The amount of mana (building currency) you have is contingent on the amount of skill points you don't apply to actual skills, so having enough to build gems that can even take out the early enemies often means leaving a majority of your hard-earned points un-used. The "endurance" mode re-plays are touted as a way to grind, but the game actually punishes you for winning such a level by adding more waves to future ones. Not just the level you beat- ALL endurance levels. So you spend a lot of time losing everything in the last few waves, wondering if a few more grinds in earlier levels would make a difference. Even the interface is a downgrade. Making higher level gems is now a fiddly hassle. Accidentally making a lower-level gem than you needed means you may as well start over. Necessary info is scarce. The unlocking of new skills is slow and tedious. Even the creator acknowledges testers found the game too hard, and responded about as resentfully as possible with an "easy" level that limits your options and can't be undone once used. It's a shame.

I love GemCraft. I beat pretty much all the previous installations. If you played the last couple of games, you know what to expect: a couple of map options at any time, a couple of gem options per map, a couple of viable strategies, and build your own maze. As far as GemCraft games go, this one is a solid title in the series. As GemCraft games go, they tend to be brutally difficult, and this is no exception; despite being a veteran, I struggled a couple of times in the first 10 levels. On easy mode, it's a wonderfully fun experience of being powerful, and mostly focusing on higher-level strategy in addition to tactics. If you like difficult tower defense games, and you like GemCraft games, I highly recommend it.