GemCraft - Chasing Shadows Reviews

Fun game

good game 10/9

it's pretty good, but the controls are very messy

love this endless voyage of trial and error, tower defence is my all time fav.

Gemcraft really seems like a baseline for TD games to me. It looks very unassuming, but sucks you in for hours and hours of complex and finely tuned gameplay. [b]Why did you play Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows?[/b] I played various GC titles in the Flash (version) back in the day. When I found it on sale here, I couldn't resist. [b]Still any good?[/b] Absolutely. To be fair, Gemcraft doesn't look like much at first: couple of towers, stones of a few different colours, that's it. But the tactical variations are insane, and the game definitely grows on you. It's fun to explore the maps and your options. Meta-Progression also gives you a plethora of options. (Perhaps being able to save a few different loadouts there would add a bit of QoL.) The game also ran absolutely smoothly - well, until I learnt how to break it. But it didn't crash on me even then. All in all this may perhaps not be the best game to get into TD strategy because of it's complexity, but it is certainly a good choice to sink loads of hours into. [b]What about achievements??[/b] Well, you're in luck there, buddy, because there's a whopping 419 of them! Most of these are pretty simple and definitely fun to achieve as you progress, but the Iron Forge one is of course hardcore. I think I racked up some 411 of 'em, and I'm looking forward to get to 100% here one day.

This has to be one of my favorite games of all time. I remember first playing the free version online when I was twelve. Years later I came across it on steam and instantly bought it. I think that it is very well designed, and I enjoy both the strategy and grind aspects of it.

Possibly the best tower defense game ever made. The good: - Solid difficulty scaling that doesn't feel impossible or too easy. - "Endurance" mode where you fight up to wave 999 after beating a stage. - Insane amount of gameplay elements. - Huge world map, hundreds of hours worth of individual stages. - Challenge stages that break your usual strategy. - 419 achievements to chase after. The good (if you are into it): - Math. Big numbers. Lots of numbers. Lots of multipliers. Number go up. Big dopamine. - Grindy. Redo early stages, get more xp, get stronger, optimize traits to get further and further. Hundreds of hours of post-endgame content. The bad: - Performance can tank once you begin to really push the limits of the game. Thousands of units on screen, hundreds of particles and effects, calculations for each individual enemy, every frame. It can be manageable once you get used to it. There are mods for this but I haven't tried them. - Once you are past endgame, there is one optimal way to play which has been optimized down to a science in the extreme endgame guide. Variety dies when only one combination of things remains valid in exponential progression, but here is so much left to do at this stage still!