Gem Miner TD

I like this game, the optimizations possible are actually kind crazy, and the way that there's a few different methods of acheiving near-infinite scaling is pretty great! I've had a lot of fun, and within the first like 10 hours i managed to make it to the top 5 on the endless leaderboard. It's not necessarily a hard game, but it certainly has a lot of replayability. Plus it's a steam game, so y'know i got it pretty cheap

If you liked the Gem Tower Defense custom map back in Warcraft 3 (or a variety of other mazing tower defense games), you will enjoy this. It's a well-done take on the original with several different game modes to provide some extra interest. It will take you a few playthroughs to start to pick up on the requirements for combining towers, but there are are excellent tooltips and user interface design to help you identify which gems/towers you have, which towers are part of an active "recipe" to make an upgraded tower, and which towers are needed to combine into higher tiers later on.

Overall a recommend; in general I find it hard not to recommend maze-builder TD games, and this one has decent longevity, but it's not without its annoyances. Mostly, the game has a lot of traps and pitfalls, and even when doing really well, you can never relax or be sloppy with your play. A lot of QoL updates would be very welcome, e.g. warning/confirmation when blocking off paths to waypoints, visualization of both regular and flying paths. There's also some annoyances, such as slow movement of the avatar, inconsistency in when the avatar moves when mining, and not being able to modify the path while the avatar is moving.

I'm really enjoying this game. There are plenty of viable strategies to get through the non-endless stages which is something a lot of roguelikes get wrong. Very confusing to start though, if I was prone to return games I likely would have, but I'm glad I stuck with it.

gems are truly outrageous

good

While the art style took some time to grow on me, Gem Miner has sound and engaging mechanics. I can't really ask for more but new content.