(Read on for the full review!)
Gemcraft is an astonishingly well crafted tower defense game with great difficulty scaling, sufficient graphics and audio, and lots of content. The RPG mechanics and lore give it life and purpose. Highly recommended.

+ Graphics: I like the variety between bleak and vivid colors.
+ Audio: Not amazing, but the hit & death sounds are quite satisfying.
+ Concept: Gem-enhanced towers? Gem bombs? Gem traps? Gem amplifiers? Yes.
+ Difficulty: Slightly easy after a spike. You can then increase the difficulty for more reward.
+ Replayability: I enjoy replaying levels with extra challenge to see what I can pull off.
+ RPG Mechanics: Unlockables, upgrades, levels, skills & spells, and story.
+ Lore: Well written, simple, given in scraps, great for those that do or don't want it.
+ UI: Simply put, the UI is extremely well done. Simple, appealing, aesthetically pleasing.
+ Variety: There's a gem for every playstyle, and many levels offering various gems.

- Brevity: Eventually, going through all the basic levels to get to unlocks can get monotonous. I would prefer fewer levels, offering more tight design and unique challenges.
- Rewards: I'm nitpicking here, but I dislike how getting really far in endurance offers much less experience than getting through the normal map on a higher difficulty or with trials on.

+/- Graphics and audio are well designed, but could be better looking/sounding.


Welcome to Gemcraft - Chasing Shadows, the tower defense game where you use various gems and combinations thereof to make your towers methodically destroy your opposition. Gemcraft brings so much to the table with its lore, mechanics, and fitting design aesthetics. There are many options to suit your playstyle, and a lovely coming together of genres to make your experience fresh and exciting. Let's take a deeper look:

You have 9 gems at your disposal: Red, yellow, orange, green, blue, cyan, purple, white, black; or chain hit, critical hit, mana leeching, poison, slowing, suppressing, armor tearing, poolbound, and bloodbound respectively. You are given select gems to beat every field with. You can use bombs, traps, towers, and amplifiers. A gem-enhanced entity that has a single or 'pure' gem will always be the strongest form of that gem. If you are to fuse gems, the individual components will be weaker, but the overall effect could be much stronger; an easy example of this would be combining almost any of them with the red gem, chain hit. I also should point out that you can fuse two pure gems of the same level to get them to the next level. (This works with hybrids, as well.) Some gems work better as traps than towers, green (or poison) being a good example of this, however, you are generally free to make things work however you wish, utilizing many or few of the tools at your disposal. On a final note on gems and their killing mechanics, I should mention that amplifiers don't seem to benefit from having their gems upgraded, they simply need any ol' gem present to provide a flat bonus.

Moving away from gems, you have 25 skills that can be unlocked. Examples include cheaper construction, more effective gem bombs, and spell enhancement. Some of these are crucial, while others come down to preference. You can reset them at any time. You also have six spells. Examples are an AOE freeze and a special beam or barrage for your towers. There are two ways of unlocking skills and spells, tomes and wizard towers. Tomes require you to kill certain enemies such as 50 giants that have been frozen in their presence. Wizard towers require you to break locks, usually by hitting them directly in different ways. You recieve talismans from beating maps, rarity based on difficulty, which do things like increase damage or experience and make gems heavier. You have a limited amount of slots for talismans. You can upgrade talismans with shadow cores or scrap them to get more. Most shadow cores will come from killing spectres. Later on, you can spend shadow cores to increase the rarity of drops.

Initially the game's difficulty will spike but once you get the mechanics down it becomes much easier. Then you have 9 trials and 3 difficulty modes to utilize. Trials are modifiers that impact the gameplay, but greatly boost your rewards. An early one adds waves and makes them arrive earlier. I recommend using this when you become familiar with a level so you can get a lot of experience. Be careful, however, because there is a mechanic where XP rewarded = current exp - previous highest exp.

You can use these mechanics to unlock field tokens, which add levels and hexes to the map. Clearing a level could unlock one or more field tokens, (and perhaps a scrap of lore) allowing you the option to prioritize certain paths through the game's fields which enables you to get to unlocks faster, or put off a tough stage. The flexibility and depth presented in Gemcraft makes for a very compelling experience not found even in most AAA TD games.

The graphics in Gemcraft are serviceable. They are great on some points, but mainly the UI. The UI has everything just the right size. It is thematic but not overly fancy or convoluted. Things are properly highlighted or out of the way. Some aspects may be large and visual as opposed to other aspects being smaller and text-based, tucked away for those that desire more information. Everything is very well laid out, easy to get to, and navigation is quick and simple. With the amount of options present, this is a great boon for Gemcraft. The map is quite beautiful, the field level icons and gem graphics are nice, and the enemies look alright. I wish the enemies had a bit more variety though, being mostly variations of bugs. The textures could also use improvement in resolution, and perhaps some in their design. Many of the stages end up looking bland because of said design flaws of the textures.

The music is good, not too obtrusive. The hit and death sounds are satisfying. Everything that needs a sound, has one, and usually they are nice. Like the graphics, however, I can't help but feel like there is a certain level of polish missing, that slight flair that can take something from amateur to professional. Noting, however, that Gemcraft - Chasing Shadows is also a free browser based tower defense game, this is all actually quite impressive.

So, in conclusion, Gemcraft - Chasing Shadows is an excellent tower defense game with fun, depth, and style in spades. The concept is beautiful. There are numerous options available, offering satisfying levels of control, and the excellent UI makes it exceptionally easy to play and navigate. The game can be as casual or hardcore as you'd like, and would be great for kids, adults, newbies and veterans alike. I recommend Gemcraft at full price. On sale is fine, too. On a deep sale, is also fine, however, you should definitely purchase this title, one way or the other. The dev deserves support, and the game is easily worth the money even at double the full price.

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