Chasing shadows or this one?

[Itchy_Scrotbag]

Are there any visual difference between the two games? Got a Tower defense itch which won't go away so looking for some advice. I have Bloons td6 but the in app purchases stop me from playing it. Cheers all

[Lord Nightcrest]

Chasing Shadows & Frostborn Wrath are practically the same game. Same engine, same design.

There are three major differences though. Two playstyle-related and one technical.

a) Chasing shadows has more gem options and less construct options. Frostborn Wrath has more construct options and less gem options.

b) Chasing Shadows endgame can be attained in like 30-40 hours of gameplay. Frostborn Wrath might need 3x or 4x this. It's far more grindy.

c) Chasing Shadows is kinder to your CPU. Frostborn Wrath is a not optimized at all or at least so it seems.

[Itchy_Scrotbag]

Originally posted by Lord Nightcrest:

Chasing Shadows & Frostborn Wrath are practically the same game. Same engine, same design.

There are three major differences though. Two playstyle-related and one technical.

a) Chasing shadows has more gem options and less construct options. Frostborn Wrath has more construct options and less gem options.

b) Chasing Shadows endgame can be attained in like 30-40 hours of gameplay. Frostborn Wrath might need 3x or 4x this. It's far more grindy.

c) Chasing Shadows is kinder to your CPU. Frostborn Wrath is a not optimized at all or at least so it seems.

I appreciate your words. Thankyou

[piccolo255]

More than that, FW is still in the post-release patching phase, and seems to be missing some content as well. I'd recommend to buy CS, then if you like it, get FW. Dev gets the money either way, and by the time you milk all the fun out of CS, FW should be in a much better state :)

(BTW, if you want more, or do a try-before-you-buy for the series, dev offers the earlier, pre-CS games in the series as a free download on their homepage: http://gameinabottle.com/ . You'll need a browser with a Flash player plugin or a standalone Flash player, though.)

[Troqu]

I'd say go for CS if you are grabbing one right now. It's cheaper, has already had all of its balance patches completed years ago, and the wiki for it will give a lot more complete answers than what you'll find here if you have questions. It will also teach you a lot of things that aren't really well taught in this game.

Come back for this one in a few months or a year and it will be a much better experience overall.

[adrian]

I'd def say play CS then FW, both are good games but CS slightly easier and slightly "worse" (as FW is a bit cleverer in gameplay, UI etc) so if you do it the other way around you'll notice it more ... also consider Labarinth first as that is also a good game and cheap.

[almoskapitany]

Frostborn Wrath is true HD (1920x1080) - and slower
Chasing Shadows looks like a 20 years old game in visuals (1088x612) - but faster, if endgame matters much to you

[Itchy_Scrotbag]

Thanking you all for the input given.

[Awesome8Dude]

Originally posted by Itchy_Scrotbag ©:

Are there any visual difference between the two games? Got a Tower defense itch which won't go away so looking for some advice. I have Bloons td6 but the in app purchases stop me from playing it. Cheers all

chasing shadows >>>> frostbotn wrath. i also have btd6 and never bought any transactions. i like the coop altouhg its laggy. btd5 offer more to do but is even lagier and i kinda like 6 more. btd battles was fun for a while, but gets repetitive if you want to win. Anyway, gemcraft is best tower defence cuz it gives you lot of control over how you play and most important time control. other tower defence is basicaly idle games making you wait 15-20 min. in btd 6 you can build 1 tower go make a tea come back on wave 30 and continue. in btd5 you can skip first 20 or 30 waves. in gemcraft you can launch all waves when yuo want . shadows offer faster game speed (1x 3 x 9x or something like that). FW only 1x, 3x. Btd has 2x.

I also love kingdom rush series. Bought on new year sale all 4 games (1st is for free). It cost about 6eur for all 4 on sale. And iron marines too. I play it on bluesttacks on pc or in mobile phone.

I also loved bubble tanks flash games on armorgames. (it has tower defence also).

And i recommend plants vs zombies 1. pvz2 seems playable on bluestacks, but ea filled it with microtransactions.

Storm the house3 on armorgames is a classic everyone should complete at least once.

[piccolo255]

Originally posted by Awesome8Dude:

shadows offer faster game speed (1x 3 x 9x or something like that). FW only 1x, 3x.

The game speeds in FW are actually 3x and 9x from CS, just relabeled (dev decided that since people rarely play on 1x, might as well remove it). There was a handful of time-related bugs because of this...

[Knight9910]

Originally posted by Lord Nightcrest:

b) Chasing Shadows endgame can be attained in like 30-40 hours of gameplay. Frostborn Wrath might need 3x or 4x this. It's far more grindy.

To go into more detail.... in Chasing Shadows, grinding was mostly an endgame bonus thing. You could more or less go straight through to the end just hopping from tile to tile, maybe grind a little bit if you felt like one field was a bit too rough. Then if you still wanted to play at the end you could try to grind up to level 50,000.

Frostborn Wrath clearly expects you to start level grinding from the moment you beat the first field (or at least from whenever you unlock endurance mode, I don't recall when that happened). Each new field you unlock is like 10x harder than the one you just beat to unlock it, and it makes the game a horrible slog. It's kind of pissing me off, to be honest...

[Itchy_Scrotbag]

Originally posted by Knight9910:

Originally posted by Lord Nightcrest:

b) Chasing Shadows endgame can be attained in like 30-40 hours of gameplay. Frostborn Wrath might need 3x or 4x this. It's far more grindy.

To go into more detail.... in Chasing Shadows, grinding was mostly an endgame bonus thing. You could more or less go straight through to the end just hopping from tile to tile, maybe grind a little bit if you felt like one field was a bit too rough. Then if you still wanted to play at the end you could try to grind up to level 50,000.

Frostborn Wrath clearly expects you to start level grinding from the moment you beat the first field (or at least from whenever you unlock endurance mode, I don't recall when that happened). Each new field you unlock is like 10x harder than the one you just beat to unlock it, and it makes the game a horrible slog. It's kind of pissing me off, to be honest...

This is rather off putting to hear in regards to Frostborn. I'll take this info on board, Thank you.

[almoskapitany]

Originally posted by Knight9910:

Frostborn Wrath clearly expects you to start level grinding from the moment you beat the first field (or at least from whenever you unlock endurance mode, I don't recall when that happened). Each new field you unlock is like 10x harder than the one you just beat to unlock it, and it makes the game a horrible slog. It's kind of pissing me off, to be honest...

this was maybe true at release, but the (early) game got significantly easier during the patches.
as i see, it is really a matter of the player's strategy skills.
players with average strategy skills seems to easily clear the first 5-6 tiles (~25 stages), then need some xp that can be easily done by a few endurances.
non-strategy players may have no clue at all what to do right after 5 stages. then they cry on forums because it is 'impossibly difficult'.
and good strategy players seem to 'easily' roll through the game without any significant walls. there are players beating the game with wizard level 80ish... most of them do that with 150ish.

so basically, this game is far more well balanced in terms of challenge
chasing shadows was similarly hard at release day, but it got watered down continuously (due to cryings), lost all its challenge, and eventually became a child's toy.
yeah, chasing shadows said to be more 'fun' because now it is so easy that anyone can clear blindfolded

[Lord Nightcrest]

Originally posted by almoskapitany:

this was maybe true at release, but the (early) game got significantly easier during the patches.
as i see, it is really a matter of the player's strategy skills.
players with average strategy skills seems to easily clear the first 5-6 tiles (~25 stages), then need some xp that can be easily done by a few endurances.
non-strategy players may have no clue at all what to do right after 5 stages. then they cry on forums because it is 'impossibly difficult'.
and good strategy players seem to 'easily' roll through the game without any significant walls. there are players beating the game with wizard level 80ish... most of them do that with 150ish.

so basically, this game is far more well balanced in terms of challenge
chasing shadows was similarly hard at release day, but it got watered down continuously (due to cryings), lost all its challenge, and eventually became a child's toy.
yeah, chasing shadows said to be more 'fun' because now it is so easy that anyone can clear blindfolded

This effectively translates into the following:

Players with pre-existing gemcraft experience will blast through it.
Players without pre-existing gemcraft experience will hit multiple frustrating walls.

[SPACE GORILLA]

If you want to dip your toes in the water of gemcraft games you can play the base games up through chasing shadows for free on armorgames, with the only missing parts usually being a skill or battle trait

[Knight9910]

I am a GemCraft veteran. Been playing since the Armor Games days. Played every game in the series except for Chapter Zero. I have 86 hours on Chasing Shadows presently. I know all of the same strategies that everyone else knows. I know how to use traps, and pylons, and how to bypass armor with poison, and so on and so forth.

So trust me when I say this game is WAY HARDER than all of the others.

And to make it clear? I'm 13 hours in and have unlocked 10 map tiles. (As in actual map tiles, not just fields.) I'm making progress. No one is claiming that the game is "impossibly difficult".

And I will say, I do understand the desire to not make it too easy... I will admit that Chasing Shadows became a bit too easy for me at the point where I realized that I could use a white-yellow gem with a tiny splash of red, and with the right skill setup, I could have an 80% chance for x50 damage, plus AoE, at like grade 6. It just broke the game right in half and made it into a cakewalk.

...but I feel like Frostborn Wrath went too far in the opposite direction, and it's just not fun to me. I have legit, no BS, found myself having to reset a field after like 15 minutes of working through it, for something as meaningless as placing one too many walls by accident and then not having the mana to upgrade a gem when I need to, which means enemies get through and banishing drains my mana and I can't do anything more except just barely hang on... That is just a level of finicky that is WAY too much for me. It makes me feel like the game is wasting my time. When the devs referred to it as "pushing toward the Dark Souls of tower defense games" ....yeah, that's about right, I think.

I do appreciate that the developers are trying to fix the game and make it more fun, but it's just not quite there yet.

(Also, side note: I also feel like the game is wasting my time when I expend the effort of breaking open a wizard stash, only for it to have a trash talisman fragment in it. I feel like, if you're going to put talisman fragments into wizard stashes, then they should be unique and powerful - something that's worth spending my time to try and get them, especially since stashes are one-time things. It should not be just another low level vendor trash fragment that's exactly the same or worse than the others I'm getting, and that I'm going to immediately sell.)