Gnomber

I want to like this game, because it has cute art and a nice concept, it adds some original ideas to the genre... but in its current state, the game i nearly unplayable. Many bombs will end up lagging the game out, to the point of about 1 frame every 5-10 seconds, especially when scaled large aoe and when they spawn more things: ie, hammers, stars, orbs, or the mist bomb or crystal bomb, which is nearly 1/3 the total number of upgrades available in the game. On top of this issue, the game has a literal wall around the arena which would be perfectly fine.... except that you can push bomb upgrades, XP, and pickups beyond the wall rendering them useless as you can never reach them. This becomes especially problematic when you have large bombs, or if you build ANY bomb force (bomb force is a huge trap, it has a negative impact on player gameplay and almost no upside). This is further compounded by the fact that the best upgrades in the games current balance is simply bomb aoe + heal inside your own bomb + damage. Any damage you do take is instantly healed, nothing can get to you, and you can kill things off screen. It literally gets to the point where you've killed all enemies in a wave before you have seen them, and instead you are left walking around a dead map waiting for more to spawn (since there is no failsafe in game to add more enemies if you kill the entire wave). This game has a cute concept, but the execution is so bad that even for 3 dollars I simply cannot recommend anyone buy the game. It needs massive work on the mechanics and balance to be remotely playable, including but not limited to: either the removal of the walls (loop the map instead, so go far enough left you end up on the right again) or to disable the effect of item and XP drops to go outside the walls/pass through the walls. A failsafe to continue spawning more enemies or repeat the wave if you kill all enemies before the next wave spawns (perhaps with a time limit before the next wave, so you dont get double waves) so players do not have a major dead time when theyre strong. Major improvements to the optimization that doesnt make the entire game break, lag, or even crash when you have powerful bombs. Rebalancing for the playerable characters: ie, the Gnoblin summons goblins, but the goblins just push enemies around (sometimes into you), do almost no damage even when you build the upgrade they scale off of, and you can also kill your own summons making them last about .2 seconds in later rounds. This would be the BARE MINIMUM that would need to be fixed before I would consider this game playable

There's a solid foundation and a lot of polish here, but the current experience leaves much to be desired. The difficulty is sharp, and I have yet to go beyond 8 minutes or so. There's no meta progression or things to help me become stronger as most games in this genre do, so you must repeatedly slam yourself against the level. You'll run into giant packs within 20 seconds of starting a level. You have no agency over the bombs you get. If you find a bomb you like using, you can't augment and use it for longer; you are forced to switch between two options once a miniboss is killed. There are no skips or rerolls. Visual clarity is rough as the mobs turn into corpses, flipping over and getting slightly darker. A bomb will sometimes kill only part of a pack, and it becomes difficult to know what is going to hurt you and what is just background noise. There's no reason for this. A blue mist bomb makes this even worse, as your bombs cover the battlefield in a fog that covers up everything in their area of effect. Blue flies are nearly the same color as XP gems. Your character is not highlighted or visually distinguished, and it is easy to lose yourself and your cursor in all the chaos. Enemies don't telegraph their moves or have discernable patterns; you'll randomly get hit by mobs with no counterplay. Things aren't explained well. The game wants you to kill a Hedgehog in the first level, but I don't know why. It didn't seem to do anything. There are different-colored mushrooms, but I'm unsure what they do. I think a lack of meta-progression exacerbates all of this. It wouldn't feel like I was wasting my time as much if I felt like I was contributing to the strength of my character and making future runs doable or if it kept track of my longest time or highest scores. Right now, it just feels flat, unfun, and unfair. There's a lot of good stuff, and the game is full of charm, humor, solid animations, and art. It needs more design to craft an experience that competes with other wave-based survival games. Making games is hard, but I believe this developer will keep iterating on this concept. For the sake of gnomes everywhere.

The concept is amusing, the game itself... Unplayable in my opinion. The framerate dies frequently whenever you attempt to build for any type of aoe (in a game about gnomes and bombs. >.>) or cast frequency. I have given the game five hours of trying to play and a large portion of those five hours has been simply waiting for the game to unfreeze or crash simply because I chose to attack instead of run in a circle doing nothing. Until the developers fix the abysmal performance issues I can't recommend that anyone purchase it, which is unfortunate because I love the concept of being a bomb-happy gnome blowing up hordes of enemies.

One could call me biased in saying that I think this a good game, but I do genuinely think it is good past my love for gnomes. It definitely needs some polish, for example, at a certain point, my game would lag from the bombs and abilities I acquired even though my PC can run literally everything else fine, including opening the game's menu. I did also have some troubles with gameplay balancing. But It's not a very old game, only a few months old, so I'd be willing to give the developers some time to work out the issues that were encountered and I'd like to see this game grow to be a contender to vampire survivors or at the minimum, a nice and fun gnome-related action roguelike.

I feel like this game took the wrong lessons from its chief inspiration of Vampire Survivors. It's more involved gameplay doesn't make up for the lack of polish, optimisation and fun factor that VS had. additionally I find the enemies while better looking are so much less distinct from the backgrounds that its a real trouble spotting them sometimes I would love to see what the Dev can do with a bit more refinement but as it stands , just play Vampire Survivors instead.

It's fun, but there's one small problem. When I reach 25 minutes on garden, it just spawns like a billion of those giant praying mantises and sure I can spam bombs, but that's just impossible when they aren't dying. Also, when I inevitably die from them, it says "Game Over"?

Gnomes

Gnorms

I love Gnombing

This game is a very fun concept but it still needs some work on the quality of maintaining frames with a larger number of bombs exploding. I just had to wait nearly 10 min for the game to unfreeze before finding out I had died because my gnomberman just became too strong after 26 min. Love the game, hoping for updates to help with the loss of frames.