Gem Wizards Tactics Review

Gem Wizards Tactics by Keith Burgun Games is a turn-based squad tactics game where you are a wizard leading one of a few factions. The game is focused on a “capture the flag” style tactical scenario where you have to capture a steadily increasing number of flags to win. 

Overview

Currently, Gem Wizards Tactics features three very different factions you can pick between. Each faction uses  its own particular style, units and characteristics. This determines which units you start with, but not what units are available or what can be used, allowing the player to explore combinations that are unclear just from the “choose your faction” screen. Each faction has a tongue-in-cheek flavor to it, however these are pretty low impact and are easy to ignore if you do not find it to be funny. 

The game offers two primary modes of play. The first is the Campaign where you start with a set of faction-specific units and the overall goal of getting to 100% conquest before the other faction does. This mode offers you one of three different stage choices each turn, with the differences between them being about terrain, percentage gained, and rescuable units that can potentially be added to your composition. Maps are procedurally generated within the constraints provided by the player, and the map type does a good job of letting you know what to expect. Generally, percentage and quality of recruited units are inversely correlated. So, stronger units tend to have the least percentage progression, while absent units lead to a big increase. 

Missions mode gives you two options. The first allows you to play steadily more difficult maps with randomly generated groups of units. The second one lets you define everything about the sort of map you want to try out and then do so. There is no progression or anything else involved in these beyond a slow increase in difficulty and complexity featured in the rank.  

The maps themselves follow a typical format. There are castles distributed throughout the parts of the map that are not near the characters, each of which feature a red flag on top. Some hexes feature gems that you can collect and are frequently used by the unit’s activated abilities. This gives some level of motivation for pushing deeper and harder into the maps to collect the resources required to take advantage of these abilities. Additionally, if the map offers some rescuable units, these are evenly distributed across the map in positions that are deep enough in enemy territory that it takes real effort to rescue them all. Winning the map requires the capture of a steadily increasing number of flags, which can be acquired from the aforementioned castles or from killing advanced units that periodically arrive with squads of their own. The maps usually offer a fairly good mix of terrain regardless of map type, which is important for providing varied tactical context for battles. Some factions do prefer certain maps, however, which provides some additional texture when choosing which battle to pick during the campaign.

Units feature stats in attack, defense, and movement. Additionally, units have both activated and passive abilities. These abilities are largely combined in ways that are counterintuitive to a unit’s typical “role” in other sorts of tactical squad games. While you still see units that are tanks or look to be mostly associated with damage, a lot of them have abilities that don’t neatly fit into the role or cause them to exist in two or more different places that give them both flexibility and the potential to use them in very distinct ways. 

The Potatoes are forest and water focused, with abilities that give them a “back to nature” druidic feel. The Azure Order is more ice-focused, though it only has one unit that actively cares about ice terrain, but is mostly terrain neutral. Business Demons are fire and roads focused, with multiple units that have increased movement costs when they aren’t on roads and a similar number that are immune to or generate fire or both. 

Weaknesses and Limitations

The biggest problem with Gem Wizards as it exists is that it feels very incomplete. It feels more like an Early Access game than one that is ready for full release. The game’s faction selection screen has more spots for “Coming Soon” than actual factions. This is fine, but it’s disappointing when combined with all of the other features that feel incomplete. The biggest of these is the campaign. The progression system is fine, but does not really provide much of a feel of progression or variety. You will recruit new units that you can play with, that add a little bit of potential variety to your team, but that does not justify playing the same sorts of maps for the same goal over and over again. There is some tactical flexibility and a need to account for different locations and how they will influence your unit’s movement and overall capabilities, but this doesn’t feel like a real progression or provide any real arc at all. You can do much the same by just playing random missions. Also, the strategic choice of what map to go to is trivial. Units have some progression, but it is entirely based on a slight increases in stats. This does not open up any additional space or interesting considerations and instead just encourages you to keep using the units you have before, which is fine in of itself, but doesn’t really open up many possibilities. 

It is difficult to go into detail about other weaknesses and limitations because there just isn’t that much to it all beyond the units and the maps. It feels more like a toy to play around with rather than an actual game at this point. The designer has a lot of plans, some of which are quite cool (which you can read here) but this is a review of the game as it is, rather than the game it could or will be. This review can be revisited once the game is complete, but it is nowhere near being complete and needs more work before it is there. 

Achievements

The unit variety is truly splendid. Playing around with the different units and factions is promising and it is clear that the designer has thought a lot about how the units are going to interact with each other and the map. While some units are better than others, all of them are interesting and have a role and it is easy to appreciate the craft that went into designing them. The game is fun as long as it is focused on learning the units and their abilities and how they interact with each other. It is only everything else that feels lacking in comparison. 

The game also uses terrain very well: it is either cosmetic or holds a tactical value, and there is a good mix between those two types. Units have the ability to create, destroy, and interact with terrain which adds tactical nuance. There is a nice balance to the number of different terrain types available, but considering how tightly woven existing factions are to the terrain, I am left wondering what sort of space there is going to be for the new factions.

Conclusion

I really wish there was more to Gem Wizards Tactics. I have some confidence that there eventually will be, but it feels like the game is being released in an extremely unfinished state. If someone was asked whether Gem Wizards Tactics was an Early Access title without knowing anything else about the game, they would almost certainly say it was. It would be fine if it was coming out as an Early Access title, but it is not. It is masquerading as a complete game when it clearly needs a lot more work to get there, and the buyer should beware.  

Jesse James Dean

Jesse is another of our turn-based game aficionados and is often found playing many different types of turn-based games, whether they be strategy games, deck-builders, RPGs, and much more. He also really likes cats.