Gemcraft – Frostborn Wrath (PC)
Dec. 17th, 2020 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroLong ago, the other wizards went mad and froze you away. Now, you’ve thawed and thirst for revenge…and at the same time, The Forgotten is free and moving towards the Spiritforge.
This is the sequel to GemCraft - Chasing Shadows, and is very similar. (The plot, to the extent there is one, is actually happening concurrently to the first game.) It’s a Tower Defense game with magical gems that you slot into towers, traps and lanterns to pick off the waves of enemies; with the added quirk that you gain experience and levels with each battle you win. (You can “grind” earlier levels, even, but only your highest score in any given level counts toward your total. Grinding really requires applying “traits” to the levels when you replay so they’re harder but give more total XP if you win.) Every stage has a Journey mode, an Endurance mode (that you don’t have to beat to list as complete, but you often have to survive long enough to unlock a “wizard’s stash” for special items), and a Trial mode (that is pure-puzzle tower defense).
To the extent I’ve developed effective strategies, they’re similar to my notes on the first game: Set up traps with status-effect gems (armor tearing first, then bleed, slow, poison and mana leeching) at the earliest chokepoint in the route, then a lantern that you force enemies to circle around with walls. Then set up a standard tower and a pylon later in the route so only the toughest enemies reach it and the tower otherwise charges the pylon. If there’s a wizard stash or mana shard, it’s probably off the main route and you need a separate tower(s) to manage it.
Note that Armor reduces damage but is removed by purple gems; and Shields each take one hit of anything to remove. So a stash with 1,000 shields requires 1,000 hits to remove. The Beam enhancement is by far the best way to deal with that problem, but surrounding the stash with towers full of level 1 gems also helps.
Later in the game, you unlock the ability to add certain gem types to stages that don’t automatically allow them. If you make it to the “mid-game” (20+ hours in, when grinding becomes totally necessary), it’s important you know the Talisman trick: If you line up fragments with the same runes on them in a row or different runes in a column, it gives you a big bonus to starting mana. The game doesn’t tell you this; or that the runes have any significance at all.
For that matter, you can grind shadow cores once you hit the semi-late game and get the Ritual battle trait. Set that to 12, go to W1 Journey, and easily kill all the giant beasts for ~400 cores/battle. If you get the Seeker Sense skill, you can generally put enough points into it to double your winnings. That’s the key to unlocking the entire talisman.
The final battle is clever, tricky, monstrously hard and a worthy end. But overall I think this game is easier than the first one, because I was able to both get that far and eventually beat it.
Overall: I think they improved this over the first game, and given that I poured 60+ hours into it, I think it was exactly what I was in the mood for.
This is the sequel to GemCraft - Chasing Shadows, and is very similar. (The plot, to the extent there is one, is actually happening concurrently to the first game.) It’s a Tower Defense game with magical gems that you slot into towers, traps and lanterns to pick off the waves of enemies; with the added quirk that you gain experience and levels with each battle you win. (You can “grind” earlier levels, even, but only your highest score in any given level counts toward your total. Grinding really requires applying “traits” to the levels when you replay so they’re harder but give more total XP if you win.) Every stage has a Journey mode, an Endurance mode (that you don’t have to beat to list as complete, but you often have to survive long enough to unlock a “wizard’s stash” for special items), and a Trial mode (that is pure-puzzle tower defense).
To the extent I’ve developed effective strategies, they’re similar to my notes on the first game: Set up traps with status-effect gems (armor tearing first, then bleed, slow, poison and mana leeching) at the earliest chokepoint in the route, then a lantern that you force enemies to circle around with walls. Then set up a standard tower and a pylon later in the route so only the toughest enemies reach it and the tower otherwise charges the pylon. If there’s a wizard stash or mana shard, it’s probably off the main route and you need a separate tower(s) to manage it.
Note that Armor reduces damage but is removed by purple gems; and Shields each take one hit of anything to remove. So a stash with 1,000 shields requires 1,000 hits to remove. The Beam enhancement is by far the best way to deal with that problem, but surrounding the stash with towers full of level 1 gems also helps.
Later in the game, you unlock the ability to add certain gem types to stages that don’t automatically allow them. If you make it to the “mid-game” (20+ hours in, when grinding becomes totally necessary), it’s important you know the Talisman trick: If you line up fragments with the same runes on them in a row or different runes in a column, it gives you a big bonus to starting mana. The game doesn’t tell you this; or that the runes have any significance at all.
For that matter, you can grind shadow cores once you hit the semi-late game and get the Ritual battle trait. Set that to 12, go to W1 Journey, and easily kill all the giant beasts for ~400 cores/battle. If you get the Seeker Sense skill, you can generally put enough points into it to double your winnings. That’s the key to unlocking the entire talisman.
The final battle is clever, tricky, monstrously hard and a worthy end. But overall I think this game is easier than the first one, because I was able to both get that far and eventually beat it.
Overall: I think they improved this over the first game, and given that I poured 60+ hours into it, I think it was exactly what I was in the mood for.
