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.

tl;dr: A very strong and quite unique tower defense game with absurd highs and frustrating lows. Worth at least trying out. [hr][/hr] [b]Good parts:[/b] [hr][/hr] [b]- Maintains engagement during gameplay[/b] 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. [b]- Unique gem combining[/b] 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. [b]- Solid choices pre-game[/b] 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. [hr][/hr] [b]Bad Parts:[/b] [hr][/hr] [b]- Fully random waves[/b] 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. [b]- No checkpoints mid-game[/b] 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.