Gemcraft: Chasing shadows (Yet another nostalgia game. Tower defense/merging)

 So, if you've been following you already know that I've played the remastered versions of some games I used to dig as a kid, and nine out of ten they turn out to be bad.

 Mostly bad because they tried to implement mechanics that weren't in the original and just didn't work, or some because they literally added nothing, put on a fifteen dollar tag and called it a day. Gemcraft had me absolutly mezmerised the first nine hours or so, I was fasinated by the seemingly endless amount of choices and possible strategies, the customizable difficulty, the swift metaprogress with amulets and experience, I was this close of calling it the best tower defense game, but then it struck me.

 I was just chilling with my usual three poison trap tactic and a aparition showed up allowing me to grind a lot of mana, much more than it was supposed to be possible.

Apparitions are only targatable by non-trap towers, hence allowing the "exploit"

 I grinded for like three hours and created gems above the max gem level, level fourteen and thirteen, I mined the entire map with more traps and was already counting how much exp I was going to get in the "endurace" waves. I thought it was kinda bullshity that few waves in the enemies simply became unbeatable but I surmised it had something to do with the strategy not being optimal or something. In other levels, I mean.

 I was ten waves in, basically the usual and the undefeatables started to get inside the formation, and so on until I realized that once the first two traps were breached, it didn't matter if I had a dozen more on the wait, the enemies would simply get to the core eitherway. This sparkled a lot of doubts, I started making different skill comboes, even those I thought suboptimal and realized that in this quality beats quantity there wasn't such thing as strategy other than funneling the enemies (there's only three types) into a killzone with two gems and upgrade until you beat the level, maybe a spell here and there, but if you couldn't beat a level that way you wouldn't be able to beat it in any way.

 To quote one of my predecessors "You do the exact same thing in every level. You place down two towers. You combine two gems for extra damage. You place them in the towers and then continue to upgrade these two gems until you win."

For which I say: game is fun until difficulty curve equalizes "tactics" into the aforementioned, and you no longer gain levels. This is about ten hours, after which playing becomes meaningless.