Month of Video Games Day 3: An Underrated Game

Day 3: An Underrated Game

Gemcraft

I'm not necessarily that much of a connoisseur of flash games, but out of what I've played, there's not a one I've had more fun with than Gemcraft and it's follow up Gemcraft: Chapter 0. The concept is simple, building off of a whole slew of tower defense games that have come before it, but it has polish and open-endedness that sets it apart from most anything else of its kind. In a world where about 40 bajillion people have downloaded Angry Birds, an equally simple concept that was well executed, I'm actually surprised that the game hasn't found commercial success, in the form of an iPhone or DS port, maybe.

The game is pretty intuitive. It's one of those easy-to-learn-hard-to-master sort of deals. The game has a top-down perspective and a series of waves of insectoid monsters come marching along a set path toward your base. Like all tower defense games, you have to construct towers along the path to kill them before they get there. The difference in Gemcraft is that you arm the towers with increasingly powerful gems. Using the mana you store up, you can create gems of a certain strength of a random color. Each color gives them certain abilities. Using more mana, you can also choose to fuse two gems together to make a stronger one. Fusing a level 1 and a level 2 will make a slightly more fortified level 2, but combining two level 2s will create a new level 3. Fusing two gems of different colors will produce a new hybrid gem with the abilities of both colors, but may not have the total power of a pure gem of the same level. You can upgrade your ability to make pure and multi-colored gems separately, as well as upgrade your total mana pool and how fast it regenerates and a host of other options. How fast you can upgrade depends on your score in each level. You can influence your score by choosing to send waves of enemies early, which you can do by clicking on the bar that runs alongside the left side of the screen. That then, is the real genius of the game. It encourages you to constantly replay levels and try to keep pushing the envelope with how fast you send enemies. And the game is fun enough to play that it's not a chore to do this. Repetition is actually fun.

Gemcraft is an example of a very simple concept very well executed. There are commercial games out there that have been made with a thousand times the resources and that require you go to through about an hour of tutorials for you to learn everything you can do that aren't nearly as fun as playing Gemcraft for hours on end.

A short one today after my long diatribe on Snake. Next: Day 4 -- Your guilty pleasure game