I’m basically finding Gemcraft: Frostborn Wrath to be an improvement over its predecessor in every way, but one of the improvements that I find particularly pleasing is in “Trial Mode”. I’d like to think that there are some Gemcraft fans somewhere who really like bombs and never do things any other way. It’s not the most straightforward approach, and certainly not the way that the game encourages normally, but it is demonstrably doable. This feels a bit like an Achievement for using only melee weapons in a FPS. There are Achievements in both FW and CS for beating a level entirely with bombs and wasps rather than towers. So if one Swarmling wanders off course in an open area, and you bomb it, you can lead the wasps to somewhere more useful. Gem wasps are now weakly attracted to the mouse pointer. Suddenly bombs were not just instant effects, but a somewhat lasting defense! Gem wasps are not powerful, but they can be a practical last line of defense, finishing off the almost-dead. Chasing Shadows introduced the concept of “gem wasps”: little specks or sparks that linger after an explosion, drifting about and darting to hurt any monster that gets close. On top of that, bombs have simply become more useful over the course of the series. You still wind up with less mana than you’d have if you had killed them without bombs, of course, but not necessarily less than you had when you started bombing them. With that turned on, the later sections of the path frequently become a sea of Spawnlings, easy for bombs to take out en masse. And this is something that happens more easily in FW than in previous games, due to an optional Battle Trait 1 An extra challenge that improves the XP and loot for the level that causes every single monster to spawn a pair of Spawnlings on death. Throwing a lot of bombs uses up your mana quickly.Īlthough not always! If a bomb kills multiple monsters, it can be a net profit. The drawback is, of course, that they’re not reusable. Unlike towers, which take time to socket the gem and then fire shots that take time to hit their target, bombs are instant. Gem bombs, as I use them, are mainly an emergency measure: when the monsters are about to close in on your Orb, usually bombs are the fastest and easiest remedy. Partly that’s because the slower advancement in power means I more often face the kind of odds where I need them. Gem bombs have been around since the very first Gemcraft game, but I find myself using them a lot more in Frostborn Wrath. Maybe even without Tome Chambers, there’s a token shape that indicates a field where you can obtain a new skill - but if so, the connection is a lot harder to notice than it was in CS, where skills were always linked to permanent environmental features. Maybe they’re just assigned haphazardly, but I’m not quite willing to believe that. What does the shape indicate, then? I have no idea. Their function as dispensers of unlockables is taken by locked chests, but locked chests aren’t indicated by the shape of the token there are plenty of locked chests in fields with just the base token. But it doesn’t have Tome Chambers or Wizard Towers.
Frostborn Wrath uses the three token shapes from Chasing Shadows (excluding the one for Vision fields), as well as a couple entirely new ones. (Usually adding more waves makes a field harder to beat, but in Wizard Tower fields, it buys you more time to destroy the locks.) I don’t think these meanings were ever explained explicitly, but it was an easy pattern to notice.įrostborn Wrath, now. Then there were trangular ones with a sort of spiral pattern to the slots, indicating a field with a Tome Chamber that teaches a new skill, and square ones with stripes, for Wizard Towers where you have to unlock certain mechanisms before the last monster wave to win and unlock other benefits. Vision fields had their special circular tokens with only one slot, shaped like flames. You had your standard triangular ones with a circular gem slot at each corner, for normal fields. How exactly a physical object grants you access to battlefields was left unexplained.Ĭhasing Shadows had four shapes of field tokens. But it also presented it as a literal token, a trinket that could be found in a locked chest or otherwise handed to you as part of your rewards on completing a level. Chasing Shadows turned these indicators into glowing gems held within holes in the frame.
Gemcraft Chapter 0: Gem of Eternity, the second game, additionally used this frame to keep track of which play modes you had completed the field in, dividing it into segments and illuminating the ones completed. In every Gemcraft game except Labyrinth, battlefields are shown on the map as a sort of frame-like icon, usually in the same bulging triangle shape as a grade 1 gem. I’ve mentioned “field tokens” a few times, so let me explain what I mean.
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