Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What The Game’s About
What happens when PopCap Games and Square Enix come together to make a game? Gyromancer. As the mage Rivel Arday, you chase Qraist the rebel leader into Aldemona Wood. Summoning beasts to aid you, you fight both Qraist’s servants and the other beasts of the forest, as you track down Qraist himself as well as additional Gyro Codes that will allow you to summon more powerful beasts.
Gyromancer gives us the mechanics of Bejeweled Twist paired with story and art courtesy Square Enix; two great tastes, but how do they taste together?
What’s Hot
On a quick glance, Gyromancer looks a lot like Puzzle Quest. There’s a reason for that: It’s a lot like Puzzle Quest, and as anyone who played that game knows, this is a good thing. The comparisons are inevitable, but Gyromancer does manage to separate itself.
The mechanics of the game work just like Bejeweled Twist: instead of swapping tiles, you have a four-tile circle to rotate the gems clockwise. It seems a little goofy at first that you can’t go counter-clockwise, but it adds a nice layer of strategy to the game that forces you to retrain your eyes to look for different layouts on the grid.
On top of those simple rotation mechanics are the monsters you collect. Each monster has an affinity color that influences the abilities it uses and how it interacts with the enemies you encounter. I had originally described the game to friends as a combination of Bejeweled and Pokemon, but while each beast has different abilities, you don’t have a ton of choice about what you use when. The affinity colors also introduce an interesting sort of rock-paper-scissors element to pre-battle planning. As you choose the three monsters that will travel into the forest with you, you have to balance out your roster with a good spread of colors to make sure you won’t be caught unawares. Further, each of the colors seems to have some differences that help balance it out. Purple, for example, has an advantage (in the form of power modifiers) over the most other colors, but its powers revolve around locking tiles in place, making the board far more difficult to navigate. All of these little details make the standard Bejeweled game much more interesting than it might’ve been otherwise.
The first thing I noticed booting up the game is the art. Each of the monsters and characters are drawn with careful detail and rich color. Even though they never move or speak aloud, I never got tired of looking at them. The artists clearly put an incredible amount of time into the work and it shows. Even the backgrounds of the maps you navigate are beautifully painted with tons of color. The music, too, is solid-—what little is there. There are only a couple battle songs, and they get old, though not so much so that my wife threatened my well-being when I was playing the game. The songs that accompany the maps play for far too short a time, but each board has a different theme and they’re all distinct from each other.
Lastly, there’s a lot of content. I played the game for 15 or 20 hours to finish the main story, while still leaving a bunch of monsters and treasures untouched. There’s also a survival mode to see how many battles you can last with one monster. Even the final stage has additional content that appears after you complete the story mode, along with a cheap downloadable map pack with three more stages that have additional monsters for your menagerie. The game and the DLC both provide a great amount of content for the price.
What’s Not
I’ll say it short and sweet: if you don’t like Bejeweled, you’re not going to like this game. Go ahead and try the demo, but if you don’t already think Bejeweled is just the newest form of rock-based drugs, Gyromancer isn’t going to change your mind.
I mentioned the DLC above as having a good amount of content for the price, but I have a few problems with it. Making it available so quickly suggests to me and many other gamers that it was probably cut from the game, and that’s a little irritating. Further, there is a smaller $0.50 “Item Pack” that you can purchase mid-battle that will let you buy some of the items you (rarely) find in-game to turn the tide of the battle. I don’t mind additional content, but the item pack is just the kind of DLC I don’t like.
While I really did like the story of Gyromancer, I get the feeling that something was missing. The description for the game refers to Rivel Arday as “the sorcerer vessel of the Godseye” and Qraist as “the countslayer.” Coupled with the art (and incredibly flowery translation), it seems like there’s a lot more story and fiction to the Gyromancer world. If a sequel comes along I’d be almost sure to pick it up to see what else the writers have in store.
The one place where I’d say Puzzle Quest definitely one-ups Gyromancer is multiplayer. The Bejeweled Twist mechanics don’t lend themselves to a multiplayer game (the enemy doesn’t actually move tiles, but rather affects the tiles that are there), but it would’ve been fun to face off against a friend with your favorite monsters in tow.
Final Word
Fans of Bejeweled will love this game. Fans of Square Enix’s stories and art have a lot to enjoy, too. If you like both, I’ll go call rehab. I think this is about as much fun as I’ve had with a tile-swapping game, and the pairing of Square Enix and PopCap turned out to be a great partnership that I hope will yield further games. Catuars vs. Chocobos, anyone?
