GemCraft: Frostborn Wrath

This one wasn’t in the Year Plans. However, I didn’t know whether I could start playing a new game while working on a review for another, but I still felt the desire to post an extra before the end of the year. So why not talk about a game that I’ve already played aplenty? It’s a long one, so I can knock it out of the list for good. Plus, it’s a genre that I love.

Just to prove how much time I spent on this game: I am
currently Level 1,100.

I already covered the previous game, Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows (shortened GCS), way back in 2018. At the time, today’s entry was in development; Frostborn Wrath (FW), also made by Game in a Bottle, was released to Steam on January 10th, 2020. I already discussed the franchise in depth in the previous article. Thus, I'll focus my efforts on discussing the differences between this entry and the previous one, and how it helps them feel like new games with different challenges as a result, despite being the same concept of merging gems to beat monsters.

Not gonna lie, I’d love to see an “Early Days” Gemcraft collection (encompassing Chapters 1, 0, and Lost Chapter: Labyrinth). It’s become trendy to do that for browser/Flash games with a strong nostalgic value, and it could help give these three a new life. I spent so much time playing Labyrinth, it’s not even funny. If Chasing Shadows started as a browser game with microtransaction elements before jumping, Frostborn Wrath is exclusively on Steam. What's this one like?

Minimal story? No problem

Points given for the style and the art.

This review is going to be more technical. There is a story that develops as we visit more fields, but it’s inconsequential to gameplay to the point it can be ignored. And I did, too, for a while. It adds flavor, explains some things, that’s about it. Our character was part of a caste of powerful wizards who began dabbling in demon-summoning black magic. The lone wizard rose against their kin, only to be forced to flee to northern lands, and frozen as retribution. One day, they unexpectedly thawed, but centuries had passed – they had to relearn magic. The mysterious recovery is explained by a warmth spell not so far away that got out of control. However, the wizard must now deal with the horrible surprises left behind.

A quest like this has to begin somewhere.

Some flying monsters onm the right, some on the left,
all over the place. Better kill them quick.

We face a demon known as The Forgotten, whose influence can be felt all over this world. Spirits of slain wizards invade, while specters, hunters, apparitions and shadows will often bust in as we explore the various fields on our way to the Spiritforge, where the root of all this evil resides. Apparitions are the dangerous new creature, as they'll fly around, reducing the damage your gems inflict on monsters, until you kill them. We'll meet rarer "boss" monsters that cause trouble on their fields. Some awoke shortly after our arrival; some were always around and must be destroyed. And of course, in the last field, there’s a final boss to fight, one that requires your wits, and any skills learned on the way.

You don't even fight The Forgotten at the end, you only fight
the Gatekeeper of the Forge. And if the Gatekeeper
alone is that tough...

This wizard's magic differs from previous GemCraft "protagonists". In GCS, you could use the Freeze, Curse and Wake of Eternity spells as well as the Bolt, Beam and Barrage gem enhancements. Most of those return; however, Curse is renamed Whiteout and confuses and weakens all struck enemies temporarily. The Wake is now Ice Shards, which works similarly – it removes a percentage of the remaining health on all monsters hit with it. Once more, you can throw gem bombs, and combine gems at will. Beyond the classic buildings (Towers, walls, traps, amplifiers), new ones have been added. The first is the lantern, an area-of-effect tower that can hit up to 6 enemies at a time (and more with skill points), though the damage and effects of a gem placed in one are greatly reduced. The second is the pylon, which a gem can fire into until three charges are filled; it will then release those charges, which inflict higher damage, whenever monsters enter its radius.

The greatest change is the selection of available gems. GCS had nine gems; FW, only six. The Poolbound (which gets stronger the higher your mana pool level is) and Bloodbound (which gets stronger the more hits it has dealt on enemies) gems are now prepackaged into every gem you’ll create. This leaves more room for different gem combinations and strategies. The Suppressing and Chain Hit gems were removed. (Not a fan of the latter’s removal, as you'll see.) Instead, we have the Bleeding Gem, which inflicts on the monsters it hits a status effect that causes them to receive more damage from all gems regardless of type, for some time. This can be combined with the Critical Hit Gem for even greater damage.

Talismans and Battle Traits

High-level talismand give some pretty crazy boosts.
It's not easy to find them, though.

You can find both shadow cores and talisman fragments when killing enemies. This time, fragments are shaped like puzzle pieces. You can sacrifice puzzle pieces to “collect” their shape, or put the pieces in the 5X5 grid to gain bonuses in battle. However, you can only put shapes where they can fit – edge pieces at the sides, corner pieces at the corners, and 4-sided pieces in the center, fitting right with the knobs and blanks of the pieces already there. You can change the shape of a fragment to fit it on the board, if you've collected the shape you want. This costs shadow cores, and so does upgrading talismans to get better effects. Talisman pieces have a level, and the higher the level, the better the rewards – but also, the more expensive in cores the upgrades are. Shadow cores can also be spent to gain extra skill points, or to boost the rarity of fragments found. Fun concept, bit tricky to figure out at first, but pretty useful; though it takes forever to get something really good.

Wave 116? That's nothing. There's a dumb concept in this
game where you need to "unlock" new waves for Endurance
by beating the new "latest" wave. I'm stuck on 280.

Among the other differences here: In GCS, you could keep going in Endurance Mode once you had beaten Journey Mode’s waves. Here, Journey and Endurance are separate, and you cannot add extra waves toa field's Journey Mode. It makes Journey Mode simpler. The disadvantage, beyond the time loss, is that as a result, the waves of Endurance Mode get tougher quicker, without the slightly easier waves of that field’s Journey Mode.

Also, when you add battle traits to a field, new waves aren’t added to the base Journey Mode’s wave count like it did in GCS. The reason? There’s 15 different battle traits, and all of them can be upgraded up to Level 12; that would be 180 extra waves at max, which would be crazy.

Yeah... that's a LOT.

Also on battle traits: Hatred makes a return, boosting monster HP significantly in the battle; you also have Awakening, which further boosts by a certain percentage the HP of monsters each wave. Some traits add other nasty effects to monsters, like Adaptative Carapace, which reduces the damage a monster takes after each hit; Insulation, which causes monsters to come onto the field with shield layers that must be depleted before they sustain any damage; Thick Air, which limits to a fraction of its HP the amount of damage a monster can take from a single blast (so forget killing enemies in one hit; with this turned on, it can take from 2 to 24(!!) hits minimum!); Vital Link, which increases by 3 to 36% the HP of a monster, for every monster waiting to enter the field; and Strength in Numbers, which adds a specific value of non-destructive armor to all monsters, for every other monster on the battlefield (it starts at 4, so if, say, there are 101 monsters on the field, all of them have an extra 400 armor – which cannot be lowered by the armor tearing gem!).

Only ever use as many Traits as you can feel you can take.
But good luck figuring out how many, exactly, that is.

You can also change elements from waves specifically, like the speed at which they come (Haste); the amount of monsters (Overcrowd – adding up to 120% more monsters each wave); Swarmling and Giant Dominations, which will transform more waves into swarmlings and giants, respectively; and Swarmling Parasites, which will cause destroyed monsters to split into two additional swarmlings, which can have anywhere from 30% to 360% of the original monster’s HP.

And THEN, (because I’m not done!!), you can even influence the entire field in a few ways. Dark Masonry increases the HP and armor of buildings and beacons on the field, and at every additional level to this trait, more beacons will be summoned to the field on every tenth wave; Corrupted Banishment, which causes monsters that slip through your defenses to return with 30% more HP and max HP, and with shield layers on top; and Ritual, which increases the number of roaming creatures (specters, hunters, apparitions and shadows) that can come by to further mess with your strategies.

Everything else

You also have to spend your points wisely.
Or just on whatever feels most useful.

PHEW! Imagine combining all that. It makes a single battle almost impossible to finish. Yipes! I just know I haven’t managed to do it yet; and that’s after spending 500 hours leveling up. I think all this together is overkill. This is also why I believe we should have kept the Chain Hit gem; when a lot of these traits are combined, it leads to a lot of monsters, all with crazy perks that require them to be hit a lot more than they'd normally need to. And that’s before throwing in HP boost traits! Yeah, the Beam and spells can help, but they’re not going to solve everything.

Of course, part of the point with Gemcraft has always been
to redirect enemies into a single path so that your towers
don't let enemies slip by towards your orb. I like this level,
you can make a nice, big square spiral.

Additionally, EXP takes longer to obtain, at least when compared to GCS. A possible reason may be that in the latter, you could throw gem bombs onto waves to summon monsters at will, all the way up to 999 per wave – a huge boost if you could withstand the risk. Here, the system involves dropping a single gem in a socket above the waves, which will apply its boosts (in both enemy numbers, enemy stats, and EXP gained) to all waves. You waste less mana and time, but the waves only get 5% more enemies per grade on the gem used as sacrifice (so, as an example, a Grade 4 gem gives 20% more monsters only), while also boosting their stats (HP and armor) a lot more. You can spend points on a skill that boosts the EXP from enraged waves, while reducing the HP/armor penalty. It’s cool that you can gain free levels to your skills by fully upgrading high-level talisman pieces. But even with all that, the grind is hard to ignore.

There are 122 fields to explore, and alongside Journey and Endurance, all of them have their own Trial version, a puzzle-based part that involves figuring out the correct actions to overcome the waves of enemies. Decent, but rarely gives enough skill points and EXP to be worth the hassle.

In Iron Wizard mode, your goal isn't just to beat each
field, it's also to break these stashes. Good luck.

The game has three difficulties. The first two are Chilling, with additional bonuses at the start of a battle to make it easier, and a boost in experience; and Frostborn, the “original” difficulty, lacking those perks and forcing you to find everything on your own. You can switch back to Chilling at any point, but then you can’t go back. The third, Iron Wizard, removes EXP, leveling, talismans, traits and shadow cores. You only get skill points from beating fields and opening iron, bronze and brass stashes by shooting at them. It’s a great mix of classic tower defense and puzzle, since you regularly need to figure out how many skill points you can afford to spend at every battle, while  trying to break more stashes to get more points to spend.

Getting to the final field and beating it isn’t so difficult, since you can always play Endurance modes to gain levels, and unlock Traits and Skills at a steady pace. You can be fairly comfortable in your abilities once you get there. However, aiming for high scores will require insane dedication. Literal billions of EXP? Yeah, good luck ever getting there…

Final words

In case it wasn’t clear, I love the GemCraft franchise, and I do spend a lot (*cough cough* 500 hours in today’s entry alone *cough cough*) of time in those games, always seeking to go further into each field, maybe even someday reach the holy grail of Wave 999.

The enemy-containing Tombs to break even make a return!

If all you want is a tower defense game with an end (beating the last field and its “final boss”), you can find this here, without any problem. However, while a lot of changes to the formula add more quality-of-life elements to a winning formula, some of the differing elements clash with Frostborn Wrath’s predecessors. All gems benefiting from boosts by mana pool level and number of hits is great, but I bemoan the removal of Chain Hit gems, which would have been extremely useful here, considering all the traits one can turn on for a single battle. In Chasing Shadows, you could set all traits at maximum level before playing a field, and still have a fighting chance. Doesn’t feel quite like it here, with just how dangerous the monsters can get with even just two or three specific traits active, never mind all fifteen of them.

Those who do seek out a challenge have three different experiences they can try, and the idea of puzzle piece-shaped talismans is fun. Later fields throw enough curveballs to keep gameplay fresh, adding new monsters on top of the ones that can derail your game. The grind is real, too - but let's be fair, if the thrill of constantly coming back for bigger numbers is what you want from GemCraft, this will also sate your desire.

Yeah, that sums up all my thoughts. Short and simple. I like Frostborn Wrath, but I do think it may have more issues when it comes to new details overall.

On this, tune in next week for the year’s Top 12!