More about Gemcraft
GemCraft is a Flash-based tower defense game that came out in June 2008 and was released by GameInABottle (who thus proved that the concept of spaces between words is alien to them). It is a game based on the age-old premise of facing a horde of enemies that move along a path while you place towers along the path to try and stop them from reaching the end of the path, but there are plenty of other unique upgrades and features to make this game stand out and make it one of the better tower defense games out there. Here are some of the key features of this game:
Gameplay
As mentioned above, the basic premise of this game is the same as most other tower defense games. It is in the formation of the towers themselves as well as the number of other features available that makes this game different. To start with, the storyline is quite basic. An evil wizard has created hordes of evil monsters that he plans to unleash on city after city, and you're a good wizard who must create towers that can stop these hordes in their tracks.
The evil monsters are obviously the things that you need to defend against, but the towers are where you make your money. Each tower can have a gem or a combination of various gems that actually give that tower its power. The power that each gem dispenses depends upon the color of the gem. The colors vary a lot, going from the regulars in red, green and blue to orange and even cyan. Each type of gem has a regular attack power as well as its own special power and some specific stats that depend on the color of the gem. So, for instance, a tower powered by a red gem will cause splash damage with its regular attacks, while the green gem might poison the monsters it hits. The strength of these towers depends upon the shape and grade of the gem. In other words, color coding is very important in this game.
To get a gem, you first have to get mana. Mana is the life-force of your wizard and therefore your game as well. Firstly, because the game never tells you this, note that when your mana runs down to 0 the game gets over. You'd think it's obvious, but it isn't. Mana is also equivalent to money in this game, so creating gems and towers and mixing up gems to make new ones all require mana. You also have the Mana Pool spell, which you will need increase your mana cap and therefore allow you to create higher quality gems. Increasing your mana cap also increases the amount of mana you gain per hit, so it is a very important part of the game.
This is where we come to the best part of the game: combining gems. You can combine gems by simply dragging one of them over the other to create and entirely new breed of gem which has the properties of both of the constituent gems and also has a higher grade. However, combining gems lowers the potency of its attack, so while the variety of a gem's attacks will increase after it is combined with another gem; the power itself will be lower than that of a "pure" gem of equivalent grade. The complexities do not end here, oh no. You also have different grades of gems, which is basically the quality aspect of a gem. There are six grades of gems, with the circular gems having the highest grades.
All of this adds a heavy amount of strategic depth to the game. You can switch gems in and out of towers without any mana penalties whenever you want to, which means you can just place towers at various points and keep switching your best gems around. Then there are water trenches, which need a small amount of mana to build and can be useful in creating bottlenecks when accompanied by some strong towers. The exceptional variety of specialties that pure gems have combined with combined gems that have a multitude of those very specialties contained within the same gem make for some mind boggling complexity. You cannot choose which gem to receive, which is slightly annoying if a bit challenging. Extra gems can be used as bombs to be thrown on the path at no mana cost. Plus, the more battles you win the more skill points you get, and you can always use these points to upgrade your skills, most of which are related to increasing the rate of earning mana or increasing the mana cap itself.
Despite all the complications, there is a very simple way to complete most, if not all of the gemcraft td. The game is based on a branched-out map system, meaning that there are different battles available at any given point. Once you reach a battle that you cannot complete (probably the first "Epic Battle"), go back to all of the earlier battles and play them again to get higher scores on all of them. This will raise your wizard level and give you more skill points to work with. Also, try to use the "Mana Pool" spell as often as you can early on, maybe till the point where it costs 600 mana or so. This increases the rate of earning mana as well as your cap, which will make it easier to buy gems and towers in the late game. Extensive use of bottlenecks with lots of trenches placed with 2-3 strong towers around should also help, as will all of the regular tower defense strategies like focusing on the corners and where paths intersect or run close.
An even simpler, if less strategy-intensive strategy, is to just let a dozen waves come at you at once (just keep pressing on the bar on the left to speed up the transition to the next level) and then spam low-level gems to throw at them repeatedly. Use any mana you earn to spam more of the low grade gems as well as increase your mana cap, and after about a dozen waves you should have enough mana to move on to a more normal strategy like the bottlenecks mentioned above. As for the tougher bosses, try to use as many high-grade armor gem towers as possible (the purple ones) and then build around them with poison (green) towers. Supplementation with the Shock (cyan) towers should help, but isn't necessary.
There really are no negative points to Gemcraft tower defence game. The interface is a bit off, especially the dragging to combine part. You might find yourself combining two gems by mistake when you originally intended to place them on the map somewhere. There is the odd glitch here and there, and the fact that it is not made immediately clear that mana is also health is also an issue. That is everything you can possibly complain about, really.
Graphics and Audio
The graphics are beautiful. The colors and contrasts are excellent, as is the detailing of the gems themselves. The way you see the ashes of a monster flying away after it gets destroyed, mixed in with shards of the gem power that killed it, is a really good effect too. You can easily turn down the graphics settings if they make the game lag, so that issue is covered as well.
The audio basically consists of some nightly sounds like the chirping of a cricket in the background, and all of this is barely noticeable. The sounds made when creating gems or destroying towers has a very "Warcrafty" feel to it. However incomprehensible that sounds, it still suits the game really well and works perfectly with it.
Conclusion
They really seem to have covered everything with Gemcraft tower defence game. From hotkeys to make playing easier, more convenient and faster, to a fast-forward button that automatically makes the speed of the game 3x instead of the standard 2x plus, of course, all of the above, you have all the makings of as good a tower defense game as you're going to ever get. Seriously, once you start playing this game you're not going to stop for a few hours at the very least thanks to the sheer innovation and complexity present within it, and it's easy on the eyes too. All in all, if you have a lot of time and want to have some seriously mind-bending fun, go for this game.