GemCraft - Chasing Shadows
BANGER · Action · 2015
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $9.99.
- Length
- 48.9h
- Value
- $0.20/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, Intel HD Graphics or better, 102 MB of storage. Windows only.
An epic, challenging tower defense game with an emphasis on strategy and replayability. Summon gems of immense magical potency and harness their unique abilities against a seemingly endless horde of monsters. The archdemon seeks to swallow the world, and you must journey to stand against her.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
December 2015 is where it bottomed out, at $1.99. Its cuts run 50 percent off as a rule. There have been 69 in the 11 years tracked, about 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 73 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. It outscores the games it most resembles, including GemCraft - Frostborn Wrath ($12.99, scores 80) and Infested Planet ($14.99, scores 71).
The math says it holds its tier up to $56.56, and you are being asked for $9.99.
Steam's global achievement data says about 20 percent of players ever finish it. On a 48.9-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Of the 388 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, none come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 78 percent of the 189 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 48.9 hours; clearing it takes 116, which is 2.4 times the campaign.
The drop-off
89% start to 20% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
87 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
High quality Tower Defense game with a neat tower combining mechanic and lots of fun ways to upgrade along the lengthy campaign on offer.
Juegardo de ambiente magico oscuro, las tematicas asi son muy de nicho para mi y los sonidos con la historia generan un buen ambiente de magia pero oscuridad a la vez, la dificultad esta bien pero si te pasas 20 mapas ya tenes los niveles y habilidades necesarias para culiarte brutalmente a cualquier tank con una gema naranja, como dice mi tia tere tomate un mate y avivate compratelo juegazo
I love this game, being able to essentially craft your own weapon from the ground up is so so nice.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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GemCraft - Chasing Shadows scores 93/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/296490/gemcraft-chasing-shadowsThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 20, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.