Gyromancer -- Pop Cap / Square Enix -- PC

[pxib]

I've played the hell out of this largely because it is such a flawless example of misunderstanding what might make a game fun. The story is pointless, complex, and forgetable. The art, while lovely, is soulless and dull. There is progression but no customization. There is tactics but no strategy. There is not one meaningful choice. It is worse than an unadorned game of Bejewled Twist because the tinsel hung loosely over tthat framework only serves to make it fundamentally worse:

Unlike Puzzlequest, turns do not alternate. Your actions control the entire game, filling bars on both your monster and the opponent's monster's abilities. Theoretically some types of monsters are weaker or stronger  against other monsters. This has negligable in-game effect. Perhaps counter-intuitively (certainly nothing in-game seems to anticipate it), the best color of monster to fight is one matching your monster's color, since matches of that color will provide maximum benefit to you and zero benefit to them. Unfortunately, because the monsters you can capture are the same monsters you fight, certain ones will have abilities which make your life more difficult whether they're fighting you or fighting for you. This is not balanced in any comprehensible way.

Pop Cap, masters of presentation and gameplay, have joined forces with Square, masters of sticky RPG elements, and produced something with neither of their strengths and many a pointless, easily avoidable weakness.

Avoid, avoid, avoid.

[stu]

Woohoo, almost picked this up from Steam for 1/2 price. Close call.

[pxib]

I want to rant more about how bad this is.

Although it allows them, Gyromancer punishes you for making non-matching twists. Were the punishment less severe, it might be worth using this to set up better matches. First, non-matching twists increment the enemy ability bars without incrementing your own. Second,  every time you make a single non-matching twist, a counter at the bottom of the screen drops down to the bottom of the previous level. This counter determines how effective your matches are at advancing your own monster's ability bars. Enough consecutive matches bump the counter up a level. The first level requires relatively few matches, each subsequent level requires more. It is rare for a battle to last long enough to get past level 3. In theory, advancing past level 5 produces something spectacular. Every time you make a single non-matching twist, the counter drops down to the bottom of the previous level. I have never gotten past level 5 because the higher the level the more effective each twist is at filling activity bars and, thus, the more activity gems there are on screen. Since any match that contains a gem causes damage, it rapidly grows impossible to continue to make successful matches without killing the enemy monster and ending the battle.

If losing activity levels wasn't bad enough, halfway through the game non-matching twists start to cause enemy gems to go off sooner and roughly double the amount they donate to enemy activity bars. Since enemy gems can appear anywhere at random, and some have very short countdowns before they explode (more or less randomly altering the board layout) a few unlucky gem locations can make victory impossible. Any non-matching twists spent destroying an inconvenient gem will advance enemy bars enough to create additional gems, which will be set off at double-time by your non-matching twists. Higher level monster abilities later in the game tend to create more gems (and locks which don't twist, and stones which don't match), exacerbating the randomness inherent to all battles.

There are four different power-ups which can only be collected from chests in the campaign. So far as I can tell the contents of the chests are randomized on each playthrough, and each chest can only be opened once. Other than the extraordinarily limited supply, there are no limits to how frequently they can be used in battle. As such, they have the same effect on monster battles as health potions do in many Asian MMOGs. Or they would, if they were worth equal amounts. One removes all locks, theoretically useful if the only time locks tend to fill the screen is when they're useful to your monster's own abilities. Another removes every single positive and negative status effect, completely counteracting the color based advantages and disadvantages monsters have (which never seem important anyway). These are both almost completely useless.

The third creates two ability gems on the board at random. This is great if you want to end a battle sooner, but since the locations are random it's unreliable. Fourth is the power-up that allows you to alter the twist direction for a single turn. This is so useful on so many different occasions that you will use them almost as soon as you receive them. You will have seven to ten of the other three power-ups at the end of the game. There is no way to trade one for another. There is no way to receive more.

[caladein]

Although it allows them, Gyromancer punishes you for making non-matching twists. Were the punishment less severe, it might be worth using this to set up better matches.

Yeah, I was having a blast with this game until they introduced that penalty.  It's relatively early too, which is unfortunate.

[Tarami]

I remember playing the demo for this. It was low-grade, budget shit.

Just confirming what pxib is saying.