Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows

I thought I wanted to play a quick game? This one could be longer than both games I reviewed before it… combined! But it’s a lot simpler to discuss. Sorry, there’s no Halloween review this year, I didn’t plan for anything along those lines. Could’ve done some more FNAF, but… nah, it can wait.

I’ve always loved tower defense games. The combination of puzzle, strategy and space management… ah, I love that. The very third game I reviewed on this blog was a tower defense game for the Nintendo DS, too: Desktop Tower Defense. There have been dozens of versions and variations, often with different mechanics; some with unchangeable paths, others where you can build the path yourself or modify it partway into a level.

Ah yes, Desktop Tower Defense. A game I
haven't touched in roughly five years...

Of all of Game In A Bottle's latest games, only one
isn't GemCraft. Dedication, right there!

Game in a Bottle brings to us Gemcraft, a series of tower defense games that were unique in execution. The towers of this strategy game wore colors, each color had an ability of its own, and you could in theory upgrade towers almost endlessly. Your sole limit was your bank of mana, which was used to build anything - towers, traps, walls, amplifiers and so on - and survive whenever monsters reached your Orb, the source of your power. Monsters reaching the Orb are respawned back at the entrance, shaving an amount of mana off your pool (an amount that gets bigger as you progress through a level’s waves, increasing difficulty), and go through the path again. The waves of monsters usually follow precise paths, but later games feature levels where you need to build a long path with walls in order to slow the monsters down - and, with some leeway, you can create an inescapable death trap where, by demolishing one wall and building another, you can capture most monsters in a loop, while leaving them vulnerable from the blast of your gem-powered towers. The left-side bar shows the progression of waves, while the right side is your gem workshop, allowing construction of gems up to Level 12 (though it’s possible to go far beyond). Some games also experiment with additional abilities such as Spells or gem enhancements. As you gain levels, you get points to use on skills that reduce the cost of towers or gems, improve the abilities of gems or have other kinds of impacts on the field.

The series has had only four main games:

-GemCraft (AKA Chapter One), which was fairly basic and in which you could only build Gems at random among the colors available in a level, adding so much unnecessary fake difficulty to the game;

-GemCraft Chapter Zero (AKA “Gem of Eternity”), which added the extra modes to every level, with now the possibility to replay early levels with some added difficulty and more Experience at the key;

-Gemcraft Labyrinth, a massive game that had 169 levels around a square map, starting at the bottom center and leading to the very center, after going around the map. It’s also where, FINALLY, you could create exactly the Gems you wanted;

-Today’s game, Chasing Shadows, also known as Chapter 2;

-And another game is in development!

Today’s game, like its predecessors, was available on the official Game in a Bottle website and other online Flash game sites such as Newgrounds and Armor Games. Unlike its predecessors, Chasing Shadows was then added to Steam on April 30^th, 2015. Both Labyrinth and Chasing Shadows both had, in their Flash versions, options to pay for more content, namely by buying a Wizard’s Pouch that unlocked additional difficulty options, and in the newest game, microtransactions involving Shadow Cores that can be used in some situations. This was removed when that one came to Steam, since you already pay to buy the full game, meaning your only option to get Cores if you’re running short is to farm them in battle.

There isn’t a lot of story to GemCraft, though it’s in there if you’re interested. A high tale of fantasy, wizards getting too confident and bringing out a monster they couldn’t defeat, which they eventually sealed into a Gem of Eternity. One young wizard became possessed by it, later freeing themselves from it, and now they’re trying to either seal it back or defeat it. This chapter’s maps contain clues as to what happened, and the story is contained within the Journey Notes.

The gems have changed throughout the series, some abilities have come and gone and, sometimes, switched to different gem colors between games. To keep this short, I’ll only discuss the nine gems here.

Top row to bottom row, left to right:
Mana Leech - Critical Hit - Poolbound
Chain Hit - Poison - Suppression
Bloodbound - Slowing - Armor Tearing

-Mana Leech: On every hit, a small amount of mana is taken from the monster. Extremely useful to farm mana early on, and a powerful tool when combined to particular gems.

-Critical Hit: Has a high chance (up to 80%) to hit a monster for the gem’s current attack, multiplied by the gem’s modifier. Doesn’t seem like much at first, but when you go far into the game, both the gem’s raw power and its boost reach crazy levels, like multiplying the raw power by anywhere from 100 to 1,000 or more.

-Chain Hit: Each attack has a chance to move on to another target and deal the same amount, and depending on the gem’s power, repeat that process on and on. Hit chains can also get crazy long, hitting hundreds of enemies with a single shot.
-Poison: These gem place poison on a target. Poison damage ignores armor, which is useful against heavily-armored waves of monsters, and stays in place for a few seconds, adding up, as a monster gets hit.

-Suppression: All monsters here regain some HP every second. Each hit from this gem permanently reduces a monster’s health regeneration, all the way to zero if hit enough times.

-Slowing: The blasts from this gem will slow down the monsters touched for a few seconds. Upgrades to this gem increase the percentage at which the monster is slowed down, and then the length of time for which that monster is affected.

-Armor Tearing: This gem’s attack decreases the armor of enemies it touches, which can be vital in waves where monsters are protected by heavy armor.

-Poolbound: Your mana pool increases in level and size as you reach some thresholds of mana. This gem’s power and specials increase along with your mana pool level.

-Bloodbound: This gem’s attack power and specials increase as it hits enemies (not as it kills them). The increase in power always goes at the same hit thresholds. Note that both this one and Poolbound will add a multiplier to the specials of other gems combined to them (except each other), any of the seven other gems - therefore, it’s extremely beneficial to combine them with other gems.

My personal favorite combo is Bloodbound-Critical Hit-Chain Hit-Mana Leech, but then again I am not putting in as much thought and research into numbers as more dedicated players do. Better players would keep track of exactly which gem, at which level, is used for each combo at every single second, throughout all the waves.

Said waves come in three varieties of monsters: Regular, known as Reavers; Swarm, a huge number of quick but fast critters; and Giants, very few and slow but tons of HP. Then there’s an entire menagerie of flying monsters; Apparitions, which can be killed for Shadow Cores. Specters will try to steal your most powerful Gem. Shadows are black flying monsters that appear on random waves, and can do various things, like summoning monsters or boosting others, oh and they keep moving when the game is paused, so be aware of that. Lastly, the Spires; all they do is move towards the Orb, but if they reach it, Instant Game Over; you gotta shoot them down beforehand, but the damage you can inflict to them per hit is limited.

As for the game levels, known as Fields: There’s the regular ones, but there’s more. Some are Vision fields, tied to the plot and featuring levels of past GemCraft games. Those are challenging, limiting greatly your abilities. Wizard Tower fields involve locks that must be broken, either by shooting at them or using spells on them, and you lose the level at the end of the final wave if all the locks haven’t been broken. Then there’s Tome Chamber fields. Each one of those has, obviously, a Tome Chamber which, when opened, unlocks a new skill (and opening the one that unlocks the skill for a Gem color can permanently unlock that gem’s color for use in all levels of the game). To open a chamber, the requirement is always to kill monsters in its vicinity, but the requirement may involve a monster type or a particular spell/s put on said monsters.

A full talisman gives LOTS of bonuses.

Sometimes, enemies will drop talisman fragments, which can be set into your Talisman. Those have a wide set of special abilities and will affect most aspects of the game; they can make your shots stronger against certain types of monsters, increase the Experience your get at the end of a battle, improve your shrine charges, make you start any level with more mana… The stronger fragments will even add extra levels to some or all of your skills! A fragment’s Level when obtained is based on the field you play, including the difficulty (Looming, Glaring - which adds 50% more waves - or Haunting, which has twice as many waves as Looming) and the Traits.

Final level, all Traits set to maximum, on Haunting?
Oh, I'm gonna lose.

There are nine Traits that can be activated, and each one adds more challenge and waves to the level, also adding to the Experience at the end of the battle as a result. The toughest Trait, Hatred, will boost the base HP of all monsters, from 50% when set to 1, to 1,000,000% when set to 10. Since that trait is so difficult, it also awards three times more XP per “Level” than any other trait (all of whom stop at “Level” 7, while Hatred stops at 10). A battle on Looming difficulty with all Traits to the maximum multiplies the base XP by 26.80, while on Haunting it’s multiplied by 105.70.

Sorry for all the dizzying numbers, it’s turning into a mathematician’s party in here! Though it’s still not as bad as people crunching numbers in Pokémon to get some Shiny with perfect stats and the Hidden ability or anything like that. But wait, there’s more.

Admittedly, a lot of fields are pretty dark.
The weather effects add to that feel.

Important to note, the browser version of Chasing Shadows required Shadow Cores to be paid in order to add Traits to a field, and it would force the player to either grind for Cores or buy some (because free-to-play economy), but the Steam version doesn’t have that limitation. In fact, Cores serve very little purpose here outside of getting better talisman fragments or upgrading the ones you have.

So every level has a set number of waves, which you can increase with Difficulty and Traits (the last level, Y6, also the longest, could have up to 262 waves, but has 99 at the easiest difficulty with no Traits activated). However! Every level, once beaten, can be played in Endurance mode, retaining the difficulty and Traits set to it, and in this mode, the challenge is to survive up to Wave… 999!

Check the red circle. 999 monsters.
Which is really nothing, since you can do it on every wave.

Oh, but that’s not all. Waves don’t really have a lot of monsters, y’know. It’s hard to reach high scores. There is another thing you can do with gems you create; use them as gem-bombs. It hasmany uses as a gameplay element, but the best is to use them on the wave counter on the left side. This is call “enraging” a wave, and it increases both the HP and armor stats of that monster. It also adds more monsters to that wave, and it’s possible to bomb waves to enrage them until they have 999 monsters. Can’t go higher than that. With some skills and talisman fragment abilities in place, the first gem-bomb tossed to enrage a wave will also increase the points given by each monster when killed, though it’s a one-time-only thing, gem-bombs tossed onto an already-enraged wave won’t do that. To recap; if your level is high enough in the game, you could go up to wave 999, enraging waves to the point of having 999 monsters in every single one (get ready to farm mana like crazy to make that happen, though), and get points for every monster that way. Add to this that points are converted into XP at the end of a level, and go to your own Wizard Level, and that a field’s Difficulty and Traits will multiply the base score to mirror the difficulty you’ve set for yourself on that field…

I dunno if you can see the score on the top right?
Nine digits. How's that for score?

Here’s the short version: Once you’re far enough into the game, scoring 100,000 points on a field is a piece of cake. Scoring a million is a bit tougher, but manageable. Ten millions? No biggie. A hundred million points? Good for your Wizard Level. A billion? Sounds very impressive. However, that’s not just doable, that’s small potatoes for long-time GemCraft players who will often turn up scores beyond the Trillions of points. I have personally gotten a billion points on a field recently… and bragged about it on every single gaming Discord server I’m a part of, because I’m an attention-seeking idiot.

Check it out. Billion points. I am insane.

Will I someday see a trillion points on a level? Who knows. The first goal is to try and beat Endurance once. It may seem easy, but 999 waves is a lot. Hell, it took me couple hours to reach the billion points mentioned earlier. And that was on Wave 160-something. Eventually the waves just become too powerful for your current set of abilities, even without enraged waves. Also remember that you only get as much XP as the difference between your current score and the previous highest score you’ve gotten on that field.

Oh, and there's over 400 achievements.

As you can imagine, there’s the base GemCraft game - beat every level on the easiest difficulty, Looming, then try beating them all on the other difficulties, Glaring and Haunting. That can take a fair amount of hours. Grind for levels by beating fields with more and more Traits added. Go for high scores. Though it’s not like you can actually compare with other players of the game… There is no real end to this game once you’ve beaten every field, just level up and beat previous high scores.

Oh, and then there's the unlockable Iron Wizard mode, in which you cannot let a single monster reach any orb on any field... or else it's instant Game Over and you must start the entire playthrough over. You heard that right.

As you can see, I haven't played much of that mode yet.

And it’s addictive. So very addictive. Beating a previous best score on a field always makes one feel happy.

That’s one of the most technical reviews I’ve ever written, but that’s Gemcraft Chapter 2: Chasing Shadows. And, unsurprisingly, I love it. It takes some time getting used to all the gameplay mechanics - which is why the review focuses so much on them. But once you’re good to go, there’s a lot of fun to be had here. From the three waves of the very first field, to the possible 262 of the final field, and unlimited options to challenge oneself, this game will greatly please fans of the tower defense genre.

Quickly, you get to unleash untold magical destruction
upon thousands and thousands of monsters.
BUT! Don't bite off more than you can chew.

The music is more of the ambient type, so I tend to turn it off early into my playthrough. Same for the sounds, which are mostly monsters getting destroyed - it gets old after a bit. No complaint on the graphics, however - those are fantastic. Well over a hundred fields to visit, many of which have their own details and charms, not to mention all the detail on the monsters and gems… Do make sure your computer doesn’t slow down easily, because on later waves a player taking risks could boost waves to have up to 999 monsters and then start many of those waves early, meaning a couple thousand monsters on the field at the same time.

It is possible to combine all nine gems together.
It's not really recommended since their abilities make up
so much of the gameplay, and those abilities are weakened
the more gems of different colors are mixed together.

The difficulty is well-balanced, with fields getting tougher over time, as should be. The true strength of GemCraft is that sometime into your playthrough, when gem-bombs become the best way to score extra points, you have the power to boost your waves… and, perhaps, do it too much to the point where your towers can’t win. You control your own balance. You set your own difficulty. If you overestimate your abilities, if you fail, you only have yourself to blame. That is awesome. This even ties into the plot, when it turns out the Forgotten, the demon the wizards have been trying to defeat, was summoned when they became too confident in their abilities and made a monster too powerful for them to beat.

YAY, VICTORY!

Really, I recommend this one. It’s a good way to spend a couple hours every once in a while, whether you just go beat fields on higher difficulty levels or aim for high scores. As for me, now that this review is written, I can finally try to let go of it, because it’s really addictive and I need to step back. Though I am definitely looking forward to the next entry in the franchise, the next Lost Chapter: Frostborn Wrath…

I also realize this review didn’t have a lot of jokes. So, three aliens walk into a bar…