GemCraft - Frostborn Wrath Reviews

nostalgic

The gold standard for depth in a TD

people say frostborm difficulty is hard well, yes sound like arknight difficulty to me good luck with that .

A classic tower defense game but difficulty turned up to max. There's a lot of depth in the postgame. Highly recommend for tower defense fans who need a challenge. I do not recommend for people who get frustrated or don't have tower defense experience because losses feel like time wasted, and you will lose a lot early on

An interesting entry in a classic series from my childhood. For those not in the know this series of tower defense was released in the old days of flash games. It is a challenging game of its genre requiring leveling up skills and pieces of your talisman with a strange puzzle system. As far as going further in the game world it is recommended to run endurance modes on previously beaten levels to grind up skillpoints to sit on as they are a decent boost to your mana that is required to build and upgrade Gems, Towers, magical traps, etc. I've played and beaten the other games in this series, and this one will eventually be no different. But with the time I've spent so far on this game already I'm having fun with the new mechanics and bosses added although I do miss the ability to drop a gem bomb on a wave to "enrage" it that was in the previous games but is strangely absent in this entry. but nonetheless If my reading is correct and this is the last entry in the GemCraft series then this is a worthy farewell.

I've been playing gemcraft since it was a flash game. I'm going to continue to play this release to get my money's worth, but I don't think I can recommend this to anyone familiar with the series or tower defense in general. Taking the game at face value and trying to meet it on its terms by playing the Frostborn difficulty. I'm very early game still. I've seen other people say the game is too unforgiving but I actually think it's worse than that. It's tedious. There are hard walls you will hit unless you go back, farm xp, unlock tomes, farm xp, rinse repeat. I think when you are getting to mid-endgame that type of pattern can be fun and rewarding to see how far you have progressed since the start. Having to do it early game to continue making progress when you haven't even unlocked half the skill tomes or most of the difficulty modifiers is an abuse of player time and, I'll just go ahead and say it, padding hours. All of this would maybe be forgivable if there was some significant change up or upgrade from last release. Again, I'm still fairly early, but it does not look that way. It's the same mechanics and skills, same skins and effects, and it looks terrible when full screen on my monitor. I know the center focus of the game has never been fidelity, but jesus christ at least give me some higher res textures. This shouldn't have been its own game, it should have been a dlc for the last release. Very disappointing and I think this is the end of the road for me and this series unless I find something mid or endgame that changes my opinion, but I doubt that.