Gem Wizards Tactics Reviews

There's some interesting ideas when it comes to skills, and combos. But I really felt bored by the actual battles. The lack of an undo button was frustrating, and when I came across the fourth potato soldier, I wondered why I should even care about getting more men on my team. Especially if they are the same exact one. The endless spawn of the enemy was not an enjoyable game mechanic either. Also, there seemed to be no way to surrender in a battle, even though it was obvious you were going to lose. So I had to keep clicking end turn over and over until the enemy would stop being dumb, and actually kill me. Overall, it just couldnt pull me in.

Purchased this game thanks to a twitter post. So far t reminds me of a frenetic advance wars with way more strategy to consider. It's not just about utilizing terrain, it's about the interaction of unit placement, terrain, and terrain modification through abilities, and exploitation of all the above with skills that have further interactions upon use. For example in the tutorial you can electrify water with a storm doing damage to everyone in water, but it spreads water in the process destroying forests in the flood. So I had an enemy standing in in a forest near a river and I used another unit's water shooting ability to knock him into the river while adding further water to the map to electricute said water and killing all the enemies at once.

A very fun and charming game that's fit for anyone who's a fan of tactics games. I especially love the environmental mechanics (e.g. casting lightning to a river to electrocute anyone in the water). The only real flaw I can think of is that the game is a bit buggy and likes to softlock. At the time of this review there's a bug where the game can just randomly lock up after an enemy attacks. Thankfully it seems the developer is actively working on this game and bugs seem to be quickly fixed after cropping up, so don't let that deter you from playing this game! Edit: It seems Steam is saying product refunded still, despite me repurchasing this game so don't let that confuse you any. Edit 2: Looks like that bug I mentioned was just patched! Goes to show how dedicated this dev is.

Deep interactions among unit abilities and terrain types. I'm having a good time discovering more of the "broken" combos. Great tactics game - very creative!

Not "great on Deck!" It should not be marked as such. This game doesn't have controller support. The devs last year said they were trying to add controller support, which is a "huge task." But the task is done! The game has been ported to consoles, where presumably it has controller support. The fact that controller support was created, but never backported to the PC version is disappointing. Why do devs do this? No cloud saves, either, apparently. This is to encourage players to replay the awful unskippable tutorial. Why? Why make a tutorial you can't skip?

Do NOT buy this game to play it on Steam Deck. There is no controller support. It should not have the verified badge. I'm sure it's a fun game if you have a mouse and keyboard. The designer has a lot of great ideas!

A real good effort that'll get there with time and with enough updates. The campaign mode has just the right length (9 missions gives you ample time to build up your units, but it's short enough that you can complete a run in an hour), but there being only one mission type (capture X amount of flags), coupled with the infinite reinforcements mechanic (which itself is not a problem since the game gives you warnings and time to prepare) means that the ways you tackle the maps are similar. Derby's story (which was added after release, from my understanding) added "Kill all enemies" objectives, which could be cool to include in the campaign somehow! That and different mission types (Defend your flags for X amount of turns maybe, or engage in a property race with the AI à la Advance Wars) would greatly reduce the repetitiveness. Each faction has unique units, and the campaign is all about mixing and matching different combinations together to make the best force possible. And this is fun! There's something very satisfying about getting a convoy of trucks and bulldozers together to push three enemies off the map at the same time. Or setting half the map on fire with the Business Demons. Or just something as simple as using the ice cream truck unit to refill a unit's action points to capture a flag in one turn. There's lots of combinations to mess around with, which is good, because your squad of 5 to 8 is almost always outnumbered. This, again, is good! I was pleasantly surprised by the difficulty curve here (ranges from ranks 1 to 20). I do think most of the difficulty (at least early on in campaigns) can be a bit RNG-based (if your first map has the neutral units tucked in a corner somewhere, or if mountains prevent you from pushing people off, etc), but for the most part this is a challenging but fair experience. With that said, after 6 hours and numerous campaign runs with every faction, I feel like I've seen most of what the game has to offer. The samey maps, the same objectives, the unit roster, all of it is a bit limited -- considering the fact that this is a one-man dev team, this is very impressive. I also encountered some bugs that hampered the experience; sometimes a bulldozer unit would get bumped and appear on one spot on the map visually, but be located elsewhere; and by the end I couldn't complete a campaign without having units from a previous campaign show up and trigger the game's cheat detector, preventing any progress towards my achievements. I would recommend the game but there's probably not enough stuff in there for 50 hours of content. Grab it on sale, or if there's a big content update (which will assuredly come).

I'll go straight to why I don't recommend the game and if you want to know the details continue reading the next paragraphs. The game has bugs and the developers are parching it, but so far there is still some breaking experience stuff. Today I lost my save twice, each for the new updates; there is no much of a plot so you aren't in front of a story driven tactics game; the art is ok, I'll explain it in more detail later; and finally as a strategy game it's unbalance, the developers are making changes along the release so today may be some changes in the units' skills. I paid 90% its prize, I regret that, but well I would suggest you to buy it half its prize because the content isn't there yet and this practices aren't a good sign either. If you need a score, its a 4/10 until its fixed, then it would be 5/10. I must clearify that I played 7 hours so far, there are some good ideas in it but it's not enough work there to make it worth its full price. [b] The bugs [/b]- Yesterday it was working fine, I guess, I didn't played it that much to notice much of a difference, but today it was another story, super frustrating. In the first update a lot of problems pop up: The grim reaper skill wasn't working, the vampire unit's graphics would disappear once it spends its AP(action points), The HUD would disappear in my turn so I couldn't choose skills, the game failed in saving my progress and sometimes the units would move more or less than their AP available. In another update I lost my save again, well it did start normally but I had no units to choose. This is for me the main reason to complain, because the game shouldn't be release if its not ready and I hate when they fix it after the fact and I also don't like the idea of a refund, because the developers have spent a lot of time on this, but it didn't work as it should have and for that there must be consequences. [b] There is no plot [/b]- This is as simple as you can get, the story is that some evil is going to take over the world and you have to stop it, the cristals are the key to that. What about characters? conversations? motivations? so far there are none. (unless you count in saving the world). Even though I'm very confident about it, I may change this review after I finish the game, to add anything or find out something else worth sharing. The special units have fast dialogs when they spawn, but those have nothing to do with character development or anything important, I guess they are meant to be funny which is fine for an arcade type of game, but is weird for a tactical game. [b] I dislike the art [/b]- but that's my personal taste, if you like what you see that's fair, I was looking for the art to be clear and work well with the gameplay; some sprites aren't that easy to figure out and the character's design is ugly atmost. There is also paintings, but those are the worse part, too lazy. [b] Unbalance tactics [/b]- This part was heavy in my desicion to buy the game, because I saw water and fire interactions, pushing and jumping, similar to into the breach (a really cool game) and it seemed cool and interesting to try out. The game is not any challenging but unfair, the maps are generated ramdomly just as the units you can get and also the enemy units as well. Other games like Into the breach do some similar things but better executed, because even random events should follow some logic to keep the experience with enough challenge and not going to far that it becomes imposible to win. An that is the main thing that makes the experience so unreliable, you may get it easy and boring with almost no challenge, only weak level enemies and spawns on the other side of the map and the cpu doesn't use its full advantages in combat making stupid desicions, like not attacking when there wont be counter attacks. or you may spawn in a bad configuration for your party, many enemies with high levels, several more spawning in your back and your skills stop working properly or something impredictible happens. The game's forte is the synergy with units' skills, they are meant to complement each other, but they didn't test it enough because many of those combinations are not worth doing along your creative options, You can either risk and see if you screw it or keep everybody close, killing enemies one at a time until you have the advantage. Some of the other reviews say that the enemies continue spawning so you must hurry to get the flags, but with the more powerful units, like the vampire and the bunny warrior, you can slowly dominate the whole map and get up to 4 or 5 new units. This may sound like this is how the game is suppose to be. I cannot debate that, but the developers are making changes, now that the game is on sale, so there are things to fix and cannot be negated. I can say from my personal experience that the game gets boring pretty quickly, every map is the same mission and progressing is tedious. This is not like advance war or Into the breach, this is an attempt of a tactical game.

This game right here is a masterpiece in game design as far as I'm concerned. The short version is that it feels a bit like a wacky version of advance wars, but that wouldn't be doing it justice, because it is something different entirely. It has a very narrow, focused scope, and concentrates on strategical fights on randomly generated maps. There are no bases, no constant rebuilding of cannon fodder, just two armies duking it out. It IS possible however to rescue units during battles, and they will stay with the army, provided they survive. Then why is it so good? Precisely because of that. The game removes all tedium, any "war of attrition", and instead focuses on the fights and strategical depth. And boy, there are so very many things to do. Every unit has at least one, often two, very unique skills, that range from terraforming, bumping units one or more tiles, dig the ground for oil, flinging fireballs, switch positions, dragging units, converting units, summoning, and many more. There are currently 4 "factions" in the game, 3 plus "neutral" units such as dragons that one might get to rescue and keep during battles. All of them are fundamentally different. One of them for example has a completely unique game mechanic where the leader of the faction is a CEO that earns money by building roads mid-battle, and can use the acquired funds to upgrade units! What I like most however is that even though the factions are so fundamentally different, they can still work really well together. One would think that synergies and combos would be mostly restricted to the faction you're playing. You'd be wrong. In one of my favorite combos, I used a demon unit to drill a hole into the ground. Not only does this serve to dig up resources, the resulting hole is a death trap from that point on. So I drilled a hole two tiles behind an enemy unit, and then used a unit from the potato faction, to catapult that enemy into the hole. There are tons of fun combos to discover just waiting to be exploited. I had tons of "Wait, what if I ..." moments, followed by "Oh my god, this actually works!" and laughter. There are also some fun things in there that are not immediately obvious. For example, if you catapult a character on top of another character, it will do a mario hop on that character, hopping on 2 tiles and damaging the character jumped on. I managed to do a 3-hop combo once, it was pure bliss. What's the icing on the cake for me is the blessings that can be received between fights. Basically, a random passive from any unit can be passed onto a unit of yours, permanently. Want a knight who not only valiantly charges, but also paves roads on the way? No problem! A vampiric, life-leeching bulldozer? Sure, why not! =D Bottom line, if you're looking for something that is simple, fun, and different enough to stand out, I wholeheartedly recommend this.

Brilliant Evergreen Design! First and foremost, *learn the rules*. there is a slight learning curve to this. Because it looks and smells like most tactics games, you might think that your primary action will be whacking enemies until their hitpoints hit zero and they disappear. While you technically can do this, you will almost certainly lose! That's not what this game is about. If you take the time to learn the abilities, learn about positioning and flanking, terrain effects, and the "stack pushing" mechanisms, you will quickly become invigorated by the possibility space. Also, the objective isn't to just wipe out the enemy. The objective is to capture flags and satisfy the win condition. Enemies are only a *part* of the tactical/strategic arc. Once you factor all of this in, the brilliance of this tactics system will reveal itself. It's been reported that this game is a bit thin on the content and the story campaign. I don't personally mind this, and what content is there is hilarious and charming. Besides, as I said, once you learn the rules, playing a match of this game is like a game of solitaire or chess. it never gets old. The game is obviously being supported and patched constantly. I'm sure it'll only get better with time. Truly. Pay once, play forever. A must-buy for those who love tactics games!