“Havoc and corruption swarms through the land, and you are one of those few wizards who can put an end to it. Create and combine magic gems, put them into your towers and banish the monsters back to hell!”

GemCraft is a very interesting game. It combines RPG elements with a tower defense game. From the get go the game is quite impressive, visually and through the gameplay. The music suits the game, but can get a bit annoying especially if you leave the game open in a tab (it sounds like a small fire constantly burning). Effects are good as well, with nice splatters when you blow up a bug.

The main premise of the game is to build towers to protect your castle/keep from the marauding waves of bugs. Each wave consists of a number of numbers of bugs of a particular type, with sizes varying from 1 (“boss bugs”) to about 24 (zergling rush). To defeat these nasties you have to use existing towers, as well as build new ones. These towers are powered by gems, from which the game gets its name.

There are 5 types of gems. There are the basic, heart-shaped ones to the all powerful circles. In between there are diamonds, squares, pentagons and hexagons – all doing varying degrees of damage. The gems come in different colors as well, giving them different stats such as splash damage, poison, slow etc, which are useful in different levels where you’ll face different waves of bugs.

To aid in your quest you are given different abilities, which require mana to use, such as placing pools of water to slow down your enemies, use unused gems as bombs, merge two identical gems into a more powerful (e.g.: merge two orange heart gems to create an orange square gem) and temporarily increase your mana pool to give you access to more powerful gems in a level. You gain mana by killing bugs or in between levels (albeit a t a slower rate).

Now onto the RPG part. As you finish different levels on the map you gain levels and quite obviously these give you points to spend on your “Skills of Magic”, which is basically a snazzy name for attributes. Spend your points wisely and you can finish the toughest of levels, though by the end of the game (and by repeating levels), you should have earned enough points to fill out all the skills. Then in game you gain various achievements, called “Amulets” which give you more points when you finish a level. So far I’ve only unlocked 3 (sad I know), but there are about 30 overall.

Besides this there are other, normal achievements analogous to Xbox ones, which reward you for completing certain goals such as killing 500 bugs. These don’t affect your score per level, but your overall score. They are there to reward the more dedicated players. Also the score you earn per level is not an indicator to your actual game score, but is more like experience as your score dictates your level.

Now onto the cons. The game can get repetitive after a certain point as you’re essentially doing the same thing over and over again. As mentioned previously the audio isn’t the most pleasant I’ve heard in a flash game, but there are worse. Bet these two hardly detract from the overall experience if you know how to space your gaming time.

Rating:

4.5 out of 5

You have got to play this game (IMO )

Casualty Tips:

• If you’ve progressed pretty far and you’re getting bored, never fear as there is an option to save the game.
• Place new towers near the entrance with the most powerful gems you can afford. They will help a lot.
• If you feel the gameplay is too slow you can either
  • Click on a button on the top left corner of your screen to speed up the game
  • Click on the numbers on the left hand sides to force spawn a wave of bugs.
• Place pools of water strategically as these can be lifesavers.