[PC/360] Gyromancer Review

[mightbe]

Gyromancer Review

Title: Gyromancer
Platform: Steam, Xbox Live Arcade
Developer: Square Enix
ESRB: Teen
MSRP: $14.99 on Steam (includes all DLC), 1200 MSP ($15 USD) on XBLA (plus $3 for each of the three DLC maps)
Editor: Rob 'mightbe' Schuster

What's Hot: A solid puzzle game at the core; Lots of visual and audio polish; Large variety of playable monsters; The difficulty curve rises quickly to offer a healthy challenge.

What's Not: XBLA users must pay additional for what PC users get included for free; Very light on the RPG elements; Rare crashes to desktop on PC.

Gyromancer will lure you in with its deceptively simple Bejeweled Twist puzzle gameplay. After that it will begin to crank up the difficulty, punishing you for idle moves and introducing more and more sinister enemies with devastating abilities.

As you'd expect for a Square Enix title it's beautiful, has a haunting orchestral score, and monster types will be familiar to Final Fantasy fans.

Unlike the seemingly similar Puzzle Quest, Gyromancer does not use an AI opponent playing on the same jewel grid to attack you with. Instead, ability bars on the bottom of both you and your enemy's creature's will fill according to how well you're doing at busting gems. If your creature's bar fills, a gem on the board becomes charged with power, awaiting your help to break and damage your opponent's health. Conversely, if an enemy bar fills, a gem is replaced with a skull gem of the same color with a floating counter on it. These evil gems must be broken before you take a number of moves equal to the counter on them lest your creature take damage.

Elder Dragon plays the role of Scissors to Dullahan's Paper.

Without an actual time limit, only a move limit, you're left to take as much time as you want between moves to check the state of the board and maximize your damage output while minimizing the effect of your opponent's attacks. Also, since you're the only person making moves on your playing field, you are in complete control of your own destiny. Never will you be blown out of a game without knowing exactly where your shortcomings are. One great feature is the glowing portions of the ability bars that give you an estimate of how any given move will affect the bar level of all of the abilities currently in play.

As you wander through the various maps of the game, you'll find one use items, monsters to battle, codes that let you summon new creatures from the world map, and stones blocking your path until you complete the stated challenge. The latter were a nice break from the struggle of overpowering your opponent's creatures but sometimes stated the objectives somewhat unclearly.

The maps are a little confusing at first but if you learn to take out the monster spawning lairs first, you'll have plenty of time to wander around unmolested.

If you find yourself outmatched by the opponents, you can raise the level of your Gyromancer which determines the level that your creatures operate at. This doesn't give any additional abilities, but does grant higher damage to your gem breaks and give your creatures larger health pools. I found that I was presented with a nice and challenging difficulty curve that was well suited to my level of gem twisting aptitude. I could definitely see some players needing to go back and replay maps to grind out levels; a most unwelcome addition from the Square Enix bag of tricks.

All told Gyromancer stands out as a solid puzzle game that took me about 24 hours of play time to get to the point where I was able to tackle the bonus maps (or DLC maps if you're on XBLA). That's no small amount of gaming for the price but it did come with a few annoyances. The PC version seems to crash to desktop without warning and while it only happened to me twice during the course of my review, other users report more chronic problems. Thankfully, the game auto-saves often so at most I lost the better part of a five minute battle. Steam also offers a demo that should be a good test of whether or not you'll have any problems with the full game.

My favorite ability from out of all of the creature abilities. Frustratingly, XBLA players have to buy DLC to unlock the map you get him from.

If you're like me, when you first heard that Square Enix was partnering with Pop Cap to produce Gyromancer you were hoping for the best of both worlds: A deep RPG with an addictive and fun core gameplay mechanic. Instead what was delivered was more of an awkward crossover that makes some strange design choices but is well worth the time for fans of Pop Cap style puzzle games. Square Enix RPG fans are to be cautioned though, gone is the dense story and character development you might otherwise expect from them.

Now if we can just get Pop Cap and Valve to partner for a Plants Vs. Zombies Source mod...

Score: 3.5 out of 5 CoGs*


*This score is based on the reviewer's experience with the PC version of the game on Steam.

[Telefrog]

Great looking game. I may have to pick up the PC version.

[menage]

Like I said in another thread. I kept wanting it to be PQ2, but now that's coming, It's to much bejeweled and too little vs style rpg-ing. I'll leave this one alone.

[jpublic]

The one thing I wish this game had was a zoom out for the maps.

[Iron Past]

From what I've read, I think most people's problems were that they were expecting a Puzzle Quest clone and it's not one. It's very light on RPG elements, but is really solid with the puzzle gameplay. It's also you against the board, not against another opponent, which turned some people off. For me, it's perfect. I prefer playing puzzle games single-player, and dislike using AI opponents most of the time. I think what it boils down to is a very pretty and somewhat deeper version of Bejeweled Twist, and if that's what people want, they won't be disappointed.

And subtitles for beast growls are funny.

[Mot Wakorb]

Originally Posted by jpublic

The one thing I wish this game had was a zoom out for the maps.

Click your character icon.

[ElektroDragon]

You were way too kind to this copycat, rushed, cashgrab piece of garbage. Can't wait for Puzzle Quest 2.

[Spigot]

Originally Posted by jpublic

The one thing I wish this game had was a zoom out for the maps.

Same here.

Originally Posted by Mot Wakorb

Click your character icon.

It isn't the same. I would like the map to be zoomed out about one order of magnitude. I'd get a better sense of if I'm headed somewhere useful or not. Otherwise it can get a bit tedious.

That said, I love this game. The fact that it's Bejeweled Twist instead of straight-up Bejeweled is a nice change and I knew the game had me in its thrall when I would wake up to images of the gems floating in front of my eyes and would imagine strategies to maximize twists while sitting in meetings.

Evil, evil game. Oh, and I never had it crash on my PC.

[Iron Past]

Originally Posted by ElektroDragon

You were way too kind to this copycat, rushed, cashgrab piece of garbage. Can't wait for Puzzle Quest 2.

It isn't, nor is it trying to be, Puzzle Quest.

[Ravenlock]

Originally Posted by ElektroDragon

You were way too kind to this copycat, rushed, cashgrab piece of garbage. Can't wait for Puzzle Quest 2.

Seems like a lot of people here are very fond of it. I haven't picked it up yet - what I said about it in the impressions thread still stands, for me - but I'll probably snag it if it shows up in the Steam XMas sale for cheap or something.

[BlackPete]

This game kind of grew on me once I stopped trying to think of it as a PQ clone. I still don't know if I'd justify grabbing this for $15, but that was before I knew that the PC version came with all DLCs. That makes the deal a bit easier to swallow (plus I don't have to worry about stupid points).