Recent reviews by PerplexVoxel

Pros:
- Several meaningfully-unique enemy types, which
- Many towers with differing strengths and weaknesses. Special mention to the boosters that provide bonuses or utility to towers around it without providing damage itself.
- The tower experience mechanic is something I haven't seen often in a TD game.
- Levels have several unique features that provide a strong set of choices. Do you mine talent tree currencies, spending gold on miners over towers? Which tower do you put on the platform that boosts range, or the one that increases projectile speed, if any?
- Level creation system. Neat.
- Expansive talent tree that provides a decent sense of long-term progression.
- Daily quest and challenge that provide a nice change of pace with good rewards.
- Compatible with mobile version.
- Levels occasionally get boosts to currency rewards, encouraging the playing of various levels when farming instead of a small handful.
Cons:
- Very grindy, needing the replaying of levels *many* times to unlock more of the talent tree or defeat bosses.
- Some enemies are particularly irritating and some towers too niche to be worth using over something else.
- Not sure if I missed it, but the effects of tower experience level and PWR weren't clearly detailed. Experience, in addition to enabling unique upgrades, improves towers' unique (gold/yellow) stats, making them stronger as they stay on the field for longer. PWR provides a percentage bonus to most of a tower's common stats, like fire rate and damage.
- Level creator is kneecapped by need to farm the components from enemies and lootboxes, especially the gates, cores/bases, and enemy portals, which come in a massive variety each.

IMO, worth giving a fair shake, especially if you're thinking of making a TD game yourself.

A 3D platforming collectathon "demo" with excellent movement mechanics that feel great to pull off in sequence, good balance of challenge, and delightful low-poly graphics. I'm surprised it hooked me as thoroughly as it did, and I'm looking forward to the release of The Big Catch.

tl;dr: A very strong and quite unique tower defense game with absurd highs and frustrating lows. Worth at least trying out.

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Good parts:

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- Maintains engagement during gameplay
This game manages to maintain a good level of player engagement relative to most tower defense games. Most only let you wind up your towers, let them go, and wait. GemCraft gives the player multiple ways to stay involved. Not only can you meaningfully fast-forward past the waiting, should it get boring, you can opt to empower waves or call multiple waves early and simultaneously to let you ride more closely to the limit of what your defenses can handle.
- Unique gem combining
The ability to combine gems with different strengths in whatever way you wish enables a huge amount of options. The game also tries to limit the prevalence of optimal strategies by disabling some gems on some maps.
- Solid choices pre-game
Before each game, you can use skill points from leveling to improve your gems and abilities. However, each skill point left unused grants additional mana/gold/currency at the start of the game, adding a non-trivial amount of decision-making outside of the specifics of a round. Thankfully, all skill upgrades are fully reverseable and refundable.
Additionally, you can adjust the difficulty by enabling monster traits that make the game harder but also multiplying experience gain and skill points. This also helps with keeping you engaged mid-game.

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Bad Parts:

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- Fully random waves
This is arguably bad or good, depending on what you prefer, but the makeup of pretty much every wave is random, with random buffs in the later levels. This makes it hard to anticipate a hard wave in advance, especially since the difficulty in this game is rather fuzzy.
- No checkpoints mid-game
The game can be painfully slow in the long-run. While the exp gap between levels isn't bad, your passive skills ask for more and more skill points to level up. To get more exp, you need to either clear new maps or reclear old maps with more experience gained than your record for that map. And so you want to be aggressive when setting the monster traits pre-game or with empowering waves mid-game. Not bad in and of itself, but if you go too far and lose, you lose all you progress on that attempt.
It is, to say the least, frustrating and disheartening to lose 40 minutes with nothing to show for it because you empowered the waves a tad too much, or because the difficulty you set scaled too hard for your gems to keep up with. Worst part: you may be tempted to push the difficulty even harder to make up for that wasted time.

Solid problem-solving game, though perhaps not as good as others in Zachtronics' line-up. I would compare this between Spacechem and Opus Magnum: Molek-Syntez is not as mind-bogglingly difficult as Spacechem, but not as freeform as Opus Magnum. If you're curious about trying a Zachtronics-like game, this is a good option. Would probably recommend Opus Magnum over Molek-Syntez, though.

Primary consideration in crafting a solution is steps, as you have a hard cap on the length of your programs before they loop (~40 steps with at most 6 manipulators). Space is also a limiting factor, but not by much. Interestingly, for each of the two campaigns, you are given twelve options of precursors to use (and as many of each as you please).

Generally, I found it not quite as satisfying when I completed a task as with other Zachtronics' games, and it feels like there is less opportunity for optimization in any category, fewer nuances to explore. This, combined with the lack of player-made challenges, limits the longevity of Molek-Syntez for me.

tl;dr - Really fun, really challenging, prepare to lose a fair amount.

Battlerite, a cross between a standard MOBA and a standard fighting game, nails the fun aspects of both: the chaos of perpetual MOBA teamfights and the skill-based matchups of fighting games.

In terms of how the gameplay feels, it mostly feels tight across the board. The matches feel responsive pretty much all of the time, and the ability kits of the characters are solid and allow for some major examples of outplaying opponents. The skill ceiling is quite high for these reasons. The skill floor, however, is also a bit on the high side, since you have to know how all your abilities work in tandem with each other. Battlerite does point out which characters of the roster are easier to understand, which helps a bit. However, if you try to learn a new character, be prepared to lose a fair amount.

In terms of its roster, while most characters don't feel unique personality-wise and most lore is glossed over (for better or for worse), there is a lot of diversity in terms of playstyle. Many of the abilities and even entire kits on show can look the same on the surface, the characters of the roster do play wildly differently and can cater to almost any playstyle. And all this is before the battlerite system comes into play, which allows for further customization by buffing abilities in any myriad of ways.

In terms of community, I can't say much. There's an option to mute the text chats in-game that defaults to on (if I remember correctly). And seeing as this is the sort of game that attracts toxicity in the same vein as pretty much any other popular MOBA, it may be best to keep it muted.

Overall, Stunlock pretty much nailed the gameplay loop of the teamfight and the skill-oriented mastery of fighting games in one package, and I recommend at least trying it out.