Gyromancer

match 3 game with some rpg leveling

Game kinda sucks. I was thinking that it would be better with it being a square/popcap colab, but it's not.

An odd teamup of Popcap and Square Enix trying their own hand at Puzzle Quest gameplay. Maybe they would have had something more successful if it weren't for the odd design decisions

• You have to pay currency any time you swap monsters on your team. This discourages experimentation and it doesn't help that a lot of the monsters are bottom-tier useless in your hands due to slow play styles or only countering one specific enemy type.
  
• Currency does not buy items. No on Xbox 360 they wanted to get you to buy a DLC pack with 10 of each item. No such DLC exists on PC, so the items you find in chests are seemingly all you get. Chests also don't respawn on any map I explored, so there's a finite amount for a normal playthrough. I'm fine with it limiting the number of times I can 'meat nuke' a boss, but the magic mirror is way too important especially after the halfway point...
  
• Said halfway point introduces a new mechanic, every twist you do that doesn't result in a match counts as you having twisted twice. It was way too easy without this mechanic, but after it's brought in it feels like a lot of the fun has been scrubbed from the game. If the enemy places an attack in the bottom-left corner (by default you can only twist clockwise), it's almost impossible to remove it in time. Instead gameplay devolves into saving your own attacks to camp the enemy's, which contributes to severely limiting which monsters are viable.
  
[*] The story feels like an awful stageplay. Laska could have been written out entirely and most maps boil down to 'chase after this person then split apart so you can chase down someone else'. The mastermind was pathetic and they don't even bother to scroll the credits when you beat him. Instead you get some more party chatter then back to the map.

Gyromancer is one of those games I try to play every few years and fail miserably, apparently forgetting just how bad it is. At a glance it looks appealing, a match 3 game involving what are basically Pokemon. Unfortunately it's marred by repetitive battles that are a real slog, combined with increasingly harsh penalties if you don't make a match on a turn.

So this review is a really a note to myself in disguise. Replay Puzzle Quest, or even the much maligned Puzzle Quest: Galactrix or Puzzle Kingdoms over this.

This is not a bad game, exactly. And I got 15 hours of fun out of it...until things got annoying. Here's the rundown:

The Good:
The actual match-3 battle gameplay is just fine. Different than PuzzleQuest, but fun.
The monster and character portraits are high quality.
The monster collection mechanic is also just fine.

The meh:
There are a lot of other mechanics that aren't clearly introduced.
The complicating mechanics that are later introduced (that basically discourage moves that don't immediately result in a match) aren't really that much fun.
Music is fine, but more variation would have helped.
How do monsters get experience? How does my level affect anything? I'm still a little confused.

The bad:
The story and dialog are a load of pretentious nonsense.
I'm fine with grinding. Ask anyone. But there comes a level where the bottleneck battle is 20 levels higher than your monsters, even if you've been grinding up till that point. Ain't nobody got time for that.
The special combo level (where you have to make a chain reaction that makes five matches) is very annoying. I've spent 20 minutes trying to get through it before giving up.

The verdict:
A great game (for about 15 hours) that eventually gets ground into the dirt by the necessity for grinding and overly difficult 'bonus' levels. Worth it if it goes on heavy discount. If not, not so much.

This is one of those ones where you want to give it both a thumbs up and a thumbs down. The actual game play is good, marred only by a sudden difficulty spike a third of the way through the game. The story - especially the writing - is awful.

The game is a collaboration between Square Enix and Popcap who seem to have both seen the cross-over hit Puzzlequest and decided they wanted a piece of the action. The core game is Bejewelled Twist with some extra running around mazes. You have different beasts to use in the matches and the affect how often special gems appear and what abilities they trigger. It does keep you on your toes strategy-wise. The main criticism of the game-play is that the rules suddenly change after four levels in a rather significant way. It does not make it easier. To be fair, without the change the game would get stale before the end, but its introduction is done poorly.

The packaging around the game-play is pitiful. The story is nonsense and the writing is terrible. I'm pretty sure the good guys were spending most of the time trying to suppress a popular uprising so the ruling classes could maintain their privilege. On top of this the art work (all static) looks like a cheap knock-off of the art from old dungeons and dragons books. The hero and heroine are eternally stuck in dramatic poses without any context.

I should add that the graphics are stuck at 720p. This was standard for Popcap games of the era, they didn't target people with the latest gaming rigs. What graphics options there are can be turned up to the maximum on any computer of the past decade (possibly two). Since most people will have been playing at at least 1080p it will be noticeable, but you get used to it.

I almost want to recommend this game, since the dialogue is VERY campy and silly, and knowing Square Enix, that aspect was definitely not intentional, which frankly makes it even funnier. However, no amount of goofy facsimiles of medieval speech patterns can save this game's terrible gameplay.

In the beginning, it's not that bad, albeit a bit weird. It has similar gameplay to Bejeweled Twist, but instead of earning special gems from matching 4 or 5 gems in a row, they're earned by filling a bar on the HUD that corresponds to your beast's color identity. There's also a Pokemon-esque type matchup chart, but it's not relevant very often. Your special gems can be matched to deal damage to the enemy, and the enemy's special gems are treated like time bombs from Twist: they count down from an arbitrary number each time you make a move, and when they expire, their effect deals damage to you.

It's a very strange system, no doubt inspired by the surging popularity of Puzzle Quest at the time of the game's development. However, every other aspect of the game seems to clash with this battle system.

- Battles can take a VERY long time, especially against enemies with high health or fast-filling bars. Add in the fact that each level only has two or three enemy types, and you'll quickly get REALLY sick of certain enemies.

- Nearly every level contains monster dens that churn out the same type of enemy, each of which must be battled along a linear path in order to fight another boss monster inside the den in order to destroy it. At least the enemies spawned from the den disappear after you kill it.

- The game has a very irritating sense of how to make battles challenging, From the most recent two bosses that I faced, the former had a mechanic that let them run from battle without placing a gem on the field to do so, forcing you to replay the same battle on a strict timer over and over until you whittled down their health. The latter instantly placed a gem on the field with a 3-turn timer, forcing me to take unavoidable damage, and this ability also has a short cooldown, so it kept churning out short timers constantly throughout the fight. I can only imagine what the later bosses are like.

- Something that I had to discover for myself (since the reviews conveniently left this detail out) is that when a certain story event triggers, the game is irreversibly changed so that making an "idle spin" (a move that doesn't actively match gems) incurs a penalty. Whenever you make an idle spin, enemy action bars are filled dramatically, and timers count down an additional time. This feels HORRIBLE to deal with, since you often have to make idle spins to avoid taking damage, and certain abilities that already felt unreliable and clunky now feel even worse, since you have to constantly match gems to avoid the penalty. In addition, there's no algorithm like in Zen Mode of normal Bejeweled that guarantees matches will appear. There's a fairly good chance (especially in longer battles) that you are forced to either take a penalty or use one of your consumable items.

- On a different note, the music is not good. It's very by-the-book fantasy music, and it almost sounds like stock music. There's also almost no variation in the battle music. One track for normal enemies, one track for "dangerous" enemies, one track for bosses, and presumably one track for the final boss. It's mind-numbing to have to listen to the same track over and over and over again.

Overall, this game is funny to watch, but horrid to play. I doubt any streamers have played this game, but that's probably the best way to experience this one, rather than spend your hard-earned Gil on this strange little satchel of gems.

Gyromancer is a fun, easy time-waster built on essentially the same premise as Pokemon and Bejeweled, but with a twist (ha HA). Trying to master all the different match challenges and uncover the different trophies in each stage provides a nice mixture of difficulty and entertainment. I would definitely recommend this for your Steam Deck when you get one, it'll kill help kill a lot of time.

Weirder than seeing PopCap's logo following Square Enix's one is to behold the aggressive breed born from such unlikely partnership.

Gyromancer is somewhat oppressive in many levels: characters art pieces can be surprisingly wicked, the plot is dark and gory, and the gameplay--as far as gem-match puzzles go--aim to constrain the player instead of encourage creative problem solving. In fact, even simple actions as spinning gems counter clock-wise (something that could be intuitively pulled off with a right click of the mouse) cost an item, and must be executed sparingly. As it piles up towards the end, some concepts communicate badly and puzzles manage to become even cryptic, an unthinkable feature for an apparently casual setup.

But it still hooks. Finding, unlocking and training gorgeous beasts proves to be rewarding--and so does simply following the classic-yet-nicely-told story. To the point it's easy to take "twisting gems" for granted and end taking the game more seriously than it has any rights to be taken.

Gyromancer succeeds by not only dressing PopCap's stuff in a beautiful coat of paint, but also by adding meaning to mundane gameplay mechanics.

I played this game on the Xbox 360 when it first came out. It's basically a clone of Bejeweled Twist with a monsters, battles and a story. I was looking forward to playing the game again, but I can't really recommend it on PC. For some reason, the game keeps crashing and I have absolutely no idea why. Seems like it is poorly optimized for PC, or maybe just my system. Worth buying when it's ultra cheap if you don't mind constant crashes.

It feels a bit weird not recommending a game I've put so many hours into. If you just want to pour a bunch of relatively mindless hours into a game, with maybe two or three periods of "OMG I'm never going to beat this particular monster," Gyromancer might be for you. However, it has some serious weaknesses.

Its main problem is that it's badly designed. When I first started playing, it was incredibly difficult. It seems like the enemy beasts were way overpowered, and I struggled to live long enough to gain the experience points necessary to level up. After a bit of grinding, the game became much easier. Because I'd tried playing Gyromancer a few years back, I knew that grinding was a very important, so I spent some time getting each stage's in-game achievements (there are no Steam achievements) before moving on. This leveled me up enough that, usually, the next stage didn't instantly kick my butt. So far so good.

Then came the later levels. One of them changed the game mechanics so that "idle twists," gem twists that didn't immediately accomplish anything, penalized you. I hated this change but it became less of an issue after I leveled up some more - the higher your beast's level compared to the enemy beast, the safer it is to do an idle twist or two. Sometimes I'd do those on purpose, because I couldn't make any other moves or because I wanted to use an attack gem, and sometimes they happened by accident, because it was super easy to accidentally twist gems that I didn't want to twist. Judging by other reviews, I'm not the only one who had this problem. I had similar issues with moving across the stage maps - my game character sometimes went in directions I didn't intend.

One of the later levels included a sudden jump in the enemy beasts' levels. There my beasts were, only at level 30, suddenly attempting to beat level 50+ enemies. After a lot of grinding, I leveled myself up enough to handle them and figured that things would just get harder from there. I thought the next stage might have level 60 or 70+ beasts. It turns out that level 70 is the max, most of the enemies from that point on were level 30-45, and by leveling myself up to handle level 50+ enemies with ease I'd made the rest of the game, for the most part, too easy. The biggest challenge I had was dealing with a few enemies that could change the direction of my twists (very annoying) and the puzzles I needed to beat in order to collect all the beasts. I looked up solutions for two of those puzzles, the Match 6 and Match 7, because there's no way I'd ever have managed those on my own - even knowing what I had to do, it took a lot of work to get the right colored stones into the right places.

I've now finished all the main stages (the story was very boring, awkward, and badly written fantasy), accomplished the achievements for most of the levels (I've decided that some just aren't worth the time and annoyance), and I think unlocked all the beasts. I'm as leveled up as I can get. I'm not 100% done with the game, but the few things left to do don't particularly appeal to me. After all those hours put in, the end just feels very "meh."

Pros:
+ A good time waster, once you've leveled up enough that the enemy beasts can't kill you in two or three moves.
+ It's fun to collect new beasts you can add to your arsenal.
+ Trying out the different beasts is fun. I had particular favorites, like the bird-based ones, the spider, and the Motu (the only favorite whose name I can remember). I worked hard for that Motu, and its abilities were worth it.
+ Decent artwork.

Cons:
- Cheesy music.
- Badly written and utterly boring story. Also, I was a bit annoyed that the main character, a dude, was great at everything, while his female traveling companion seemed useless and kept either dying or offering her life so that someone else could live.
- The game mechanic where idle twists increased your chance of having enemy gems added to your board and made the enemy gems count down faster was very annoying. I also hated the (thankfully very few) enemy beasts that could change the direction of your gem twists. It was hard to get my brain used to the new direction.
- Accidental idle twists are really easy to do, which makes the game mechanic where you get punished for them even more annoying.
- Enemy difficulty was, after a certain point, badly planned. The game threw very high level enemies at players at a relatively early point (still several stages to go). I leveled up in response, only to encounter almost nothing but weaker enemies (lower level than the enemies that inspired me to level up) for the rest of the game.
- Some of the beasts in the beast roster seemed to be designed more for the computer to use against you than for you, a human, to use. For example, the gnat-based beasts had special abilities that were so annoying to use that they seemed to count more as handicaps.

Ah, the "match 3" craze. I think it's probably petering off now, but match 3 games were everywhere a few years back and more and more kept popping up. Gyromancer was another trying to cash in on tht craze, following in the limelight of stuff like Puzzle Quest. I remember back when Tetris and Columns were revolutionary. Now the market is oversaturated, and stuff like Gyromancer is just kinda dull. If match 3 kinda games are your heroin, you might want to check Gyromancer out, but otherwise, it's just that sort of game, and doesn't really offer anything great or worth your time, in my opinion.

Most important thing to know about this game is that it is NOT PUzzle Quest. If you come into this game expecting something like Puzzle Quest, you will be disappointed. Puzzle Quest is an rpg with a puzzle game as the core of it's combat system. Gryomancer is a puzzle game with a fantasy theme and a few very light rpg items tacked on.

You have skills, but they all work automatically. Make a match (using Bejewled Twist instead of Bejeweled) and both your skill gage and the enemy's fills up. Match your current monster's color to fill a lot fast, match the enemy's to stop it from filling at all. Full gages turn jems into jems that do things when involved in matches if it's your, or timed jewels that go off if you dont' get rid of them if they are the enemies.

That's mostly it. There are also maps to explore and experience levels which change the rate of skill filling and different monsters you can add to your party. The focus is more on the puzzle side with the other stuff flavoring it.

Is is good? Yes, I think it is very good.

Ignoring the issues others have mentioned - boring, easy, repetitive, RPG elements VERY minimal, no reason to complete most of their challenges - my chief complaint is that suddenly, after 8 hours of play, all my menu text disappeared. Restarting didn't fix the issue...ok fine, I'll verify the files. 2 files redownloaded. And then apparently the issue was my saved game, because it wiped it. So I thought I'd test it again. Started brand new game with no issues. Exited game. Verified - 2 files redownloaded. Started Gyromancer again...yep, save game wiped again. This is a MAJOR issue and I realize it's a rather old game but the thought of replaying the last 8 hours made me never want to touch this again. Do not buy.

I was lured in by pretty graphics and match 3 gameplay. I quietly suffered through cringeworthy writing and an interface that is so bad I was amazed that any one at Square Enix allowed it to be published. I made it through an obnoxious boss battle where the guy keeps running away but the screen dramatically announces my "DEFEAT", then I chase him around on the silly map until he finally stops and I can go through it over (... and over and over) again.

These weren't the reasons I decided to put the game away for good. What really got to me were the things added to provide a "challenge". I need a good challenge but there comes a point when it's not fun anymore. I'm very familiar with match 3 games and lots of them add things like locking or freezing pieces on the board or making pieces require timely removal before something bad happens. This game uses all of those but in ways that are excessive. There were too many times when a dangerous piece appeared but had a very short timer and I had no matches on the board and frequently no matching colors anywhere near the piece. So I'd have to make what the game calls "Idle Twists" to move the pieces where I needed them. The game makes sure you know every time you've done this by filling the screen with the words "IDLE TWIST" in an overly dramatic way and punishing you. It feels excessive because it's making an awfully big deal about a necessary part of the strategy.

Then to top it off, when you produce a special attack piece it gets locked in place. I don't know why. It seems unnecessarily cruel. But it's fine, right? I mean, in most match 3 games that's not such a big deal but in this "twisting" style of game it creates big limitations and to top it off you need those pieces fairly quickly to advance but you also immediately need to get rid of the "bad" pieces but none of the matching colors you need are on the board or if they are you still need to slowly nudge them over while getting punished with every careful and tedious click. On some boards I played I had absolutely no chance of winning because of the game's design and algorithms. That wouldn't have been so annoying if a loss didn't mean such a heavy penalty as it does in this game because of the "rpg" elements. I just wanted to play a cool twisty match 3 with a fantasy story and pokemon-like pet collecting and nice pictures. That's not what this is. This is a game that hates the players and wants us to suffer.

Tl;dr: I feel like the people who made this game didn't have an understanding of what makes a match 3 game fun to play.

Fans of Bejeweled Twist should consider this game!

How many times in BT have you wished you could rotate the gems the other way? This game gives you that opportunity (and you may change your mind).

When your beasts reach about level 25 the next story stage does show level 50 enemies, but all you need to do is pay attention. (I read several negative reviews when I reached that point in the game. I think the authors may have gotten to that point and stopped playing.)

Not sure why i've decided to buy this game after i have tried a demo many years ago. Maybe i thought it would have more things later in the game. But the game is more of the same stuff and it gets too repetitive and boring fast. Also the vague story telling doesn't help to improve impressions. Dialogs are often weird, story twists are silly and confusing. Hero controls on the global map are annoying. Connecting 3 items (or more) in a row by rotating a square of 4 items clockwise is a bit of too much. One has to have a very good spacial imagination to quickly see combinations. Enemies don't have to do that, so this is a bit unfare. They use your combinations for resources for their attacks. Also you don't just have to make your attacks, but proactively remove enemies attacks from the board. It quickly becomes very frustrating as game starts to introduce more blocks (locking certain items, making enemies' attacks to trigger faster, punishing for idle rotating of items, etc.). And the attacks your monsters have don't matter much. Yes, some trigger faster and do less damage, but you still just connect lines of items all the time without keeping much attention to them and the attacks trigger automatically. Puzzle Quest is way better in this regard, where you have to select what attacks to equip, when to trigger them and it actually matters what colors you connect. This game also has steep difficulty curve. You run easily through one stage and then stumble on another because monsters are much harder. Some challenges are based on simple luck (you have to make a cascade of 7 subsequent combinations, and you can't really prepare the board for that, because the board is too small and you have to rotate 4 items at a time, so you just sit their and mindlessly rotate them hoping to get that challenge..).

There are better and more interesting games in that genre (both mechanically and story wise). Gyromancer is a bland and boring clone, which can't offer much strategy. You have to repeat samish battles over and over again, slowly grinding levels to beat stronger monsters. And the story told is boring and not rewarding.

Second Impression (update to my first impression) :

I've been looking for another good "Puzzle Quest" style game. Up to this point, the only types of those games that I did like were the actual Puzzle Quest series. Puzzle Kingdoms, Dungeon Hearts, and Legend of Fae were almost good, but not good enough in comparison to the quality of the PQ series. I loved Runespell: Overture, but that involves cards instead of gems. I've been looking forward to Gyromancer for a while and had it held up in my backlog for even longer. I definitely enjoyed it at first, though the latter half of the game may turn off some people. And like PQ, it does feel good to earn you wins through a bit a strategy, but I found alot of "close calls" came out in my favor purely due to the luck of the way gems dropped on the board.

Instead of swapping adjacent gems horizontally or vertically, you swap them with a rotation tool of sorts. While unique, it does feel rather annoying when you have an easy match, but can match gems because they are in a odd corner, to the left of your cursor, or stuck near locked gems that can't be moved. This is part of the game design of course, but in the later levels especially, you often feel like you may not have what you need to match gems to prevent damage to you or attack the enemy. Only the player gets to make the gem swaps, but over time and also depending on which gems you swap, the enemy's ability meter will increase until they activate and morph a gem into a timed attack gem on the board or cause a status effect to one or both monsters. You then have a limited amount of turns to use that morphed gem in a match and remove it before it causes damage to your monster. This generally requires strategy and a bit of luck. My other complaint is that the game does appear to want you to potentially replay completed levels, as some paths of a stage are not cleared until after you beat it, which also mean you can't complete all the stage challenges in one run.

One annoyance in gameplay I have is that you don't get enough items. In the start of the game, you get a few, but I never felt like I needed them. Once I got into the 3rd part of the world map, rounds were harder and there were so many situations where I could have used a Magic Mirror to rotate gems counter-clockwise or a Magick Key to unlock a locked gem, but couldn't because I only had one left that I wanted to save or had none at all. Items are found in chests and not in any store, but it almost feel like luck to get them because chests are found on certain parts of the level trail and you can't see the entire trail to know where to go. You have to assume where your route will take you.

Another irritant is that it seems like you will probably need to grind to play the later half of the game succesfully. When my monsters were around level 20+, I started seeing monsters at level 50 plus. Thankfully, some older levels will have paths you couldn't get to before, but can now, but it also feels like a pretty articial way of extending the game more than it needed to be.

Gyromancer seems pretty good from the few hours I played. It doesn't keep my interest long enough which each sitting for me to have long play sessions like I did with PQ. The need to grind and backtrack put me off a bit - I don't mind it in certain games, but I don't really care for it here. That could be part of the reason it isn't well known, since this can get fairly difficult for casuals. This is probably the next best thing to the Puzzle Quest series from what I played, outside of Runespell: Overture.

Game really reminds me of Bejeweled - In fact it is Bejeweled Twist with the RPG Elements of Square Enix. Its very challenging but you have to go through the tutorial to really understand it , because if you write off this Bejeweled Themed game as a puzzle game with a visual skin slapped on it, you will not win at this game.

There have been people who have not been able to run this game. It has to do with people who don't have very high resolution monitors or their monitor can't support certain resolutions. I've posted a workaround in the forum for this that should work for everyone but it will result in a 640x480 resolution.

Gyromancer started out well enough. Sure, it's cribbing on the whole Puzzle Quest phenomenon but the game was fun at least. Then a few missions into the game, they added a new rule where you can't switch jewels without causing a match without getting penalized. That, combined with an enemy ability that locks certain jewels into place makes this game too hard and too unrewarding. If you really want to play Gytomancer, just get one of the Puzzle Quest games instead.

By opting for an asymmetric style of puzzle play (as opposed to Puzzle Quest et al's symmetric style of you move, AI moves), Gyromancer more consistently rewards mastery, making for a much more satisfying play experience. If you enjoyed PQ but felt frustrated by its high variance, Gyromancer is for you.