Labyrinth tells the story of a wizard at the end of his apprenticeship who mistakenly believes that an attack on the town he live in and the appearance of a strange labyrinth nearby are part of his final wizard test. However, to excel in the game a well-rounded portfolio of skills are necessary. You can build a character highly specialized in generating mana or perhaps one who is good at creating towers. The level-difficulty-to-player-power ratio is skewed in favor of the game, forcing you to go back to earlier levels to replay them at a higher difficulty to get more experience.Ī customizable skill system allows you to fine-tune your abilities from level to level. A level may only take a mere five or 10 minutes to play through but with 169 of them to survive you are looking at quite a time commitment. Each of these choices adds to the experience multiplier, allowing you to choose your reward if you have the power to prevail. Enemies dying too quickly? Give them 10 times the hit points. Want more enemies to kill? Sure, jack that up to four times.
At the start of each level a list of options allows you to customize the difficulty factors. While the game play is nothing new, the real star of this title is the level difficulty setting. This gives the game an interesting balance of conserving power to build but also resist attacks. Mana, as in previous iterations of the game, is both your life force and the power source you use to build your arsenal. While you are still provided with only two types at the start of the level you can spend mana to unlock more. Previously you were limited to specific types of gems you could use on each level. A huge improvement compared to past GemCraft titles is the ability to buy additional gem types during a level for different attacks. You build towers and place shiny, colorful gems in the towers to rain death down upon hordes of monsters that are trying to kill you. Labyrinth is the third title in the GemCraft series. The change and sense of accomplishment that comes from surviving a level is at the heart of the game’s playability. Despite the repetitiveness of the game play every time I die I cannot help but click the “replay level” button. The ability to fine tune the level difficulty and customize the skills available greatly increases the depth of the game.
The game play is fairly standard issue for the tower defense genre: build defenses, kill monsters and then kill some more monsters. Got some time to kill? Why not check out GemCraft Labyrinth, the most tedious, time consuming game you will ever love. Quinn Conklin and Quinn Conklin, Co-Editor-in-Chief