These runs can easily take 9+ hours to do and still hardly reach wave 300 because of game related lag(I can lag to hell in gemcraft while playing other games without issue at the same time) some options seem to not work as I have turned off shield bubbles and still see them. I do not know how to turn off monster shadows. GemCraft: Chasing Shadows is the latest installment of the fantasy tower defense game by GamesInABottle. Your property is under attack, so you must protect it at all costs. Craft the most powerful and valuable gems the World has ever seen and place those into the turrets to increase their powers. Try to defeat'em all and win victory over hordes of evil.

Of all of Game In A Bottle's latest games, only oneisn't GemCraft. Dedication, right there!Game in a Bottle brings to us Gemcraft, a series oftower defense games that were unique in execution.

The towers of this strategygame wore colors, each color had an ability of its own, and you could in theoryupgrade towers almost endlessly. Your sole limit was your bank of mana, whichwas used to build anything - towers, traps, walls, amplifiers and so on - andsurvive whenever monsters reached your Orb, the source of your power. Monstersreaching the Orb are respawned back at the entrance, shaving an amount of manaoff your pool (an amount that gets bigger as you progress through a level’swaves, increasing difficulty), and go through the path again.

The waves ofmonsters usually follow precise paths, but later games feature levels where youneed to build a long path with walls in order to slow the monsters down - and, withsome leeway, you can create an inescapable death trap where, by demolishing onewall and building another, you can capture most monsters in a loop, whileleaving them vulnerable from the blast of your gem-powered towers. Theleft-side bar shows the progression of waves, while the right side is your gemworkshop, allowing construction of gems up to Level 12 (though it’s possible togo far beyond).

Some games also experiment with additional abilities such asSpells or gem enhancements. As you gain levels, you get points to use on skillsthat reduce the cost of towers or gems, improve the abilities of gems or haveother kinds of impacts on the field. Today’s game, like its predecessors, was available on theofficial Game in a Bottle website and other online Flash game sites such asNewgrounds and Armor Games. Unlike its predecessors, Chasing Shadows was thenadded to Steam on April 30 th, 2015.

Both Labyrinth and ChasingShadows 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 beused in some situations. This was removed when that one came to Steam, sinceyou already pay to buy the full game, meaning your only option to get Cores ifyou’re running short is to farm them in battle.

Said waves come in three varieties of monsters:Regular, known as Reavers; Swarm, a huge number of quick but fast critters; andGiants, very few and slow but tons of HP. Then there’s an entire menagerie offlying monsters; Apparitions, which can be killed for Shadow Cores. Specterswill try to steal your most powerful Gem. Shadows are black flying monstersthat appear on random waves, and can do various things, like summoning monstersor 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 theyreach it, Instant Game Over; you gotta shoot them down beforehand, but thedamage you can inflict to them per hit is limited. As for the game levels, known as Fields: There’s the regular ones, butthere’s more.

Some are Vision fields, tied to the plot and featuring levels ofpast GemCraft games. Those are challenging, limiting greatly your abilities. WizardTower fields involve locks that must be broken, either by shooting at them orusing spells on them, and you lose the level at the end of the final wave ifall the locks haven’t been broken. Then there’s Tome Chamber fields. Each oneof 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 permanentlyunlock 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 requirementmay 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, whichcan be set into your Talisman.

Those have a wide set of special abilities andwill affect most aspects of the game; they can make your shots stronger againstcertain types of monsters, increase the Experience your get at the end of abattle, improve your shrine charges, make you start any level with more manaThe stronger fragments will even add extra levels to some or all of your skills! Afragment’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 asmany 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 beactivated, and each one adds more challenge and waves to the level, also addingto 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, to1,000,000% when set to 10. Since that trait is so difficult, it also awardsthree 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 allTraits to the maximum multiplies the base XP by 26.80, while on Haunting it’smultiplied by 105.70. 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 lotof monsters, y’know. It’s hard to reach high scores. There is another thing youcan do with gems you create; use them as gem-bombs. It hasmany uses as a gameplay element, but the best is touse 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 moremonsters to that wave, and it’s possible to bomb waves to enrage them untilthey have 999 monsters. Can’t go higher than that. With some skills andtalisman fragment abilities in place, the first gem-bomb tossed to enrage awave will also increase the points given by each monster when killed, thoughit’s a one-time-only thing, gem-bombs tossed onto an already-enraged wave won’tdo that. To recap; if your level is high enough in the game, you could go up towave 999, enraging waves to the point of having 999 monsters in every singleone (get ready to farm mana like crazy to make that happen, though), and getpoints for every monster that way. Add to this that points are converted intoXP at the end of a level, and go to your own Wizard Level, and that a field’sDifficulty and Traits will multiply the base score to mirror the difficultyyou’ve set for yourself on that field. Here’s the short version: Once you’re far enough intothe game, scoring 100,000 points on a field is a piece of cake. Scoring amillion is a bit tougher, but manageable.

Ten millions? A hundredmillion points? Good for your Wizard Level. Sounds very impressive.However, that’s not just doable, that’s small potatoes for long-time GemCraftplayers who will often turn up scores beyond the Trillions of points. I havepersonally gotten a billion points on a field recently and bragged about it onevery single gaming Discord server I’m a part of, because I’m anattention-seeking idiot. Will I someday see a trillion points on a level?

The first goal is to try and beat Endurance once. It may seem easy, but999 waves is a lot. Hell, it took me couple hours to reach the billion pointsmentioned earlier. And that was on Wave 160-something. Eventually the wavesjust become too powerful for your current set of abilities, even withoutenraged waves. Also remember that you only get as much XP as the differencebetween your current score and the previous highest score you’ve gotten on thatfield.

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 allon the other difficulties, Glaring and Haunting. That can take a fair amount ofhours. Grind for levels by beating fields with more and more Traits added.

Gofor high scores. Though it’s not like you can actually compare with otherplayers of the game There is no real end to this game once you’ve beaten everyfield, just level up and beat previous high scores.

That’s one of the most technical reviews I’ve everwritten, but that’s Gemcraft Chapter 2: Chasing Shadows. And, unsurprisingly, Ilove it. It takes some time getting used to all the gameplay mechanics - whichis why the review focuses so much on them.

But once you’re good to go, there’sa lot of fun to be had here. From the three waves of the very first field, tothe possible 262 of the final field, and unlimited options to challengeoneself, this game will greatly please fans of the tower defense genre. Quickly, you get to unleash untold magical destructionupon 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 toturn it off early into my playthrough.

Same for the sounds, which are mostlymonsters getting destroyed - it gets old after a bit. No complaint on thegraphics, 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 detailon 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 to999 monsters and then start many of those waves early, meaning a couplethousand 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 upso much of the gameplay, and those abilities are weakenedthe more gems of different colors are mixed together.The difficulty is well-balanced, with fields gettingtougher over time, as should be. The true strength of GemCraft is that sometimeinto your playthrough, when gem-bombs become the best way to score extrapoints, you have the power to boost your waves and, perhaps, do it too much tothe point where your towers can’t win. You control your own balance. You setyour own difficulty.

If you overestimate your abilities, if you fail, you onlyhave yourself to blame. That is awesome. This even ties into the plot, when itturns out the Forgotten, the demon the wizards have been trying to defeat, wassummoned when they became too confident in their abilities and made a monstertoo powerful for them to beat.