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GemCraft - Frostborn Wrath

in library

4.2/5

( 12 Reviews )

4.2

12 Reviews

English
12.9912.99
Why buy on GOG.COM?
DRM FREE. No activation or online connection required to play.
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GemCraft - Frostborn Wrath
Description
The epic tower defense journey continues with GemCraft - Frostborn Wrath. You have finally broken free from your frozen prison, and while your body is still numb of cold, there is no time to lose. Reclaim your knowledge of wizardry, create versatile gems, and place them into various buildings to tur...
User reviews

4.2/5

( 12 Reviews )

4.2

12 Reviews

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Product details
2020, Game in a Bottle, ...
System requirements
Windows 7/8, Intel Core i5, 4 GB RAM, 300 MB available space...
Time to beat
52 hMain
73 h Main + Sides
118 h Completionist
74.5 h All Styles
Description
The epic tower defense journey continues with GemCraft - Frostborn Wrath. You have finally broken free from your frozen prison, and while your body is still numb of cold, there is no time to lose. Reclaim your knowledge of wizardry, create versatile gems, and place them into various buildings to turn them into deadly weapons. Repel the waves of monster horde attacks, and face sinister enemies as you fight your way back towards the Spiritforge. The Forgotten is already on her way there, gathering a demonic army and getting stronger than ever. Can you stand your ground against the growing darkness?

GemCraft is a dark fantasy, fast-paced, real-time strategy, tower defense game where you can create and combine gems of various properties, combine and upgrade them, construct buildings to house your gems for even more diverse uses, and cast spells to further enhance your gems or strike at the enemy. Level up, unlock skills, and replay levels with battle traits to level up even more and eventually become a wizard of immeasurable power.

GemCraft - Frostborn Wrath is the fifth chapter in the series, a new puzzle piece in a branching epic story arch.

Key features:

  • Repel the monster horde in more than 100 fields of battle with various conditions and challenges.
  • Craft and combine six types of gems with different effects to shape your defense strategy or make quick tactical decisions in the heat of the battle.
  • Two dozen passive skills to unlock and enhance as you level up and increase your power.
  • Socket fragments you find into your mystical talisman to obtain new special bonuses.
  • Cast devastating spells to decimate your foes or enhance your gems.
  • Control the speed of battle with fast-forward or pause to fit your play style.
  • Enrage the upcoming monster waves to make them more fierce but also give more experience points to level up further.
  • Unlock a wide range of battle traits, combine and stack them to replay battlefields for more dangerous battles with greater rewards and more XP to level up even more.
  • Hold out as long as you can in Endurance mode, where you can gain additional endurance wave stones to set your next endurance run even longer.
  • Fight in Trial mode with a fixed set of gem types, spells, and difficulty settings to test your bare hands gemcrafting skills and unlock wizard stashes with various rewards.
  • Gain more than 600 achievements that will reward you with more skill points and unlock higher battle trait levels as you earn them.

Feature highlights for veteran wizards of GemCraft - Chasing Shadows:

  • A brand new GemCraft chapter with whole new fields and chapter map to explore.
  • Full HD native game resolution for more detailed and crisp visuals.
  • Larger battlefields (GCCS: 54x32 tiles, 1 tile = 17x17 pixels; GCFW: 60x38 tiles, 1 tile = 28x28 pixels)
  • Redesigned player interface, gem types, skills, battle traits, strike spells.
  • New buildable buildings (lanterns and pylons), more powerful shrines, new kinds of hostile and support structures, new creatures to fight.
  • Gems get stronger when your mana pool levels up (all gems have the poolbound bonus only white gem component had in GCCS).
  • Brand new talisman system with fragments inspired by jigsaw puzzles, and a collectible fragment shape collection to transform fragment shapes to fit.
  • New endurance mode starting at wave 1 and beginning with short endurance runs that can be extended by gaining endurance wave stones.
  • Almost all of the fields have a challenging Trial mode with fixed spells and mana regardless of wizard level (similar to vision fields in GCCS)
  • Linked waves (2 waves start at the same time, i.e. giants can arrive together with swarmlings).
  • One click gem creation, pre-adjustable gem creation grade, upgrade gems in the inventory with the mouse wheel too.
  • Enraging gem slot - enrage all waves by socketing one gem.
System requirements
Minimum system requirements:
Why buy on GOG.COM?
DRM FREE. No activation or online connection required to play.
Safety and satisfaction. Stellar support 24/7 and full refunds up to 30 days.
Time to beat
52 hMain
73 h Main + Sides
118 h Completionist
74.5 h All Styles
Game details
Works on:
Windows (7, 8, 10, 11)
Release date:
{{'2020-01-10T00:00:00+02:00' | date: 'longDate' : ' +0200 ' }}
Size:
179 MB

Game features

Languages
English
audio
text
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User reviews
Overall most helpful review

Posted on: June 28, 2020

MischiefMaker

Verified owner

Games: 818 Reviews: 66

Tower defense at its most flexible

Gemcraft is a tower defense game whose main feature is modular tower design. Each defense consists of a base building (towers shoot projectiles, traps harm enemies walking over them, amplifiers boost adjacent towers, etc) and is powered by a gem which gives the tower its elemental properties (Blue gems slow, green gems poison, yellow gems add a chance to crit, etc). You can build base buildings ANYWHERE and also add wall tiles to assist with mazing, but the more buildings of a type you build, the higher the cost, including wall tiles, so you need to be strategic with when and how you build your mazes. Gems, on the other hand, have a set cost to create, upgrade, and/or combine. Combination gems have weaker elemental effects but do more damage. Note that while the game looks super hectic in videos, you have the option to pause and build any time you want. Outside of play you earn XP for passive skills and have a talisman that can slot jigsaw puzzle piece-shaped random stat boosts. Each map is playable in story mode, endless mode, and puzzle mode. There are HOURS of gameplay here if you want it. The downside is the production values are one step above programmer art. The music is just a faint mystical ambient track. However the enemies DO have a very satisfying "POP" sound when they die. The options and combinations this game offers the player are staggering. If you want tower defense, you get a lot of bang for your buck with gemcraft!


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Posted on: August 6, 2020

fuzzythinker

Verified owner

Games: 173 Reviews: 6

Fun, but a bit grindy

I enjoyed the difficulty curve, and the challenging trials. Typically, brute force doesn't solve any challenge, but creative use of walls, traps, amplifiers and towers will. However, the artifcat, and endurance challenges force a hard grind. The artifact provides wonderful bonuses towards the game in non-trial modes, but requires another resource, shadow orbs, to power up. You get maybe a few hundred after a single play of an average level. To power up the artifact, requires around a hundred thousand shadow orbs, and this is before dealing with the different levels of its pieces. A high level piece (80+) can require an additional ten thousand or so to completely power up. You want to do this, as it gives you free skill points and nice damage bonuses. The high level pieces come from breaking open vaults or ramping up the difficulty on replaying a level. The vaults reach high levels of ridicuolusness in toughness. A million health and armor, really? Even with my high number of hours of play, I'm not any where close to unlocking the artifact completely or upgrading each piece completely. To conclude It is fair to play through and beat. Don't try to 100% it.


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Posted on: June 25, 2020

Mossadian

Verified owner

Games: 1177 Reviews: 21

Finally!

hours of fun, but it can be really tricky to get the right combination and orders of gems in the tower.


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Posted on: February 26, 2021

WarlockOne

Verified owner

Games: 542 Reviews: 26

...I liked the earlier ones...

GemCraft is a tower defense game. As other reviews have mentioned, the game offers a lot of flexibility in how you set up defenses. There are gems you can slot into defenses with a variety of effects (increased mana, critical hits, armor-breaking...) different kinds of buildings that will change how those gems interact, a huge skill tree. You can build walls to try to send the swarms on an optimal path, even pause and re-route the enemy flow, given mana and time. All of this was in previous GemCraft games. There are some additions, like lanterns, and probably more I have yet to see. I don't know if I ever will, however. Because the vast majority of the changes that have been made arbitrarily and gratuitously make the game harder, with no real benefit to the player unless they're the sort who really enjoys repeating the same sequence over and over again to minimal benefit. To be clear, this goes way beyond "grinding". The amount of mana (building currency) you have is contingent on the amount of skill points you don't apply to actual skills, so having enough to build gems that can even take out the early enemies often means leaving a majority of your hard-earned points un-used. The "endurance" mode re-plays are touted as a way to grind, but the game actually punishes you for winning such a level by adding more waves to future ones. Not just the level you beat- ALL endurance levels. So you spend a lot of time losing everything in the last few waves, wondering if a few more grinds in earlier levels would make a difference. Even the interface is a downgrade. Making higher level gems is now a fiddly hassle. Accidentally making a lower-level gem than you needed means you may as well start over. Necessary info is scarce. The unlocking of new skills is slow and tedious. Even the creator acknowledges testers found the game too hard, and responded about as resentfully as possible with an "easy" level that limits your options and can't be undone once used. It's a shame.


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Posted on: June 14, 2021

NightBlade129

Verified owner

Games: 35 Reviews: 2

Great game, brutally hard as GemCraft is

I love GemCraft. I beat pretty much all the previous installations. If you played the last couple of games, you know what to expect: a couple of map options at any time, a couple of gem options per map, a couple of viable strategies, and build your own maze. As far as GemCraft games go, this one is a solid title in the series. As GemCraft games go, they tend to be brutally difficult, and this is no exception; despite being a veteran, I struggled a couple of times in the first 10 levels. On easy mode, it's a wonderfully fun experience of being powerful, and mostly focusing on higher-level strategy in addition to tactics. If you like difficult tower defense games, and you like GemCraft games, I highly recommend it.


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