Gem Miner TD

Gem Miner TD is one of the best tower defense games I've played since the Warcraft 3 days. Mazing really matters, there is fairly heavy run-to-run variance due to an appropriate amount of randomness, and the towers are fun and allow a lot of choice of strategy. I've been really enjoying the new "async PvP" mode. It's a run with preset modifiers so that everyone is playing with the same rules. At the end of the run, if you clear the final boss, you have the option of sending that boss to other player's mazes on the leaderboard. The boss loads into their maze with its health equal to the amount of damage you dealt. If it survives their maze, you beat them. If it doesn't, you lose to them. It continues this until it narrows down where to insert your current maze into the leaderboard. Usually it takes 3-5 runs until it finds your spot. You get to see other people's mazes, what strategy they went with, how lucky they were with RNG, etc. I think this is a wonderful way to bring PvP to the tower defense genre, as it's something that has been severely lacking for over 15 years now. While it doesn't have quite the magic that real-time PvP has, it's still a very fun feature that adds a lo…

While the art style took some time to grow on me, Gem Miner has sound and engaging mechanics. I can't really ask for more but new content.

Overall a recommend; in general I find it hard not to recommend maze-builder TD games, and this one has decent longevity, but it's not without its annoyances. Mostly, the game has a lot of traps and pitfalls, and even when doing really well, you can never relax or be sloppy with your play. A lot of QoL updates would be very welcome, e.g. warning/confirmation when blocking off paths to waypoints, visualization of both regular and flying paths. There's also some annoyances, such as slow movement of the avatar, inconsistency in when the avatar moves when mining, and not being able to modify the path while the avatar is moving.

good

An incredibly fun and addictive game with amazing build variety. It is an absolute must play for any tower defense fan. Highly recommended!

If you liked the Gem Tower Defense custom map back in Warcraft 3 (or a variety of other mazing tower defense games), you will enjoy this. It's a well-done take on the original with several different game modes to provide some extra interest. It will take you a few playthroughs to start to pick up on the requirements for combining towers, but there are are excellent tooltips and user interface design to help you identify which gems/towers you have, which towers are part of an active "recipe" to make an upgraded tower, and which towers are needed to combine into higher tiers later on.