Gem Hunter

In order to create an addictive runner game, it’s important for the gameplay to stay exciting for as long as possible, not to mention the fact that a bit of a challenge is required to keep the players engaged. Repetition is not such a bad thing when you are constantly on your toes, but too much of it can ruin the mood, so it’s a delicate balancing act when you consider the genre as a whole.

Gem Hunter is a simple arcade runner game in which your only goal is to jump over rocks and make sure you collect as many gems as you can along the way. There are no grand ideas at work here, so it’s no wonder that the experience gets boring in a matter of minutes, no matter how excited you might be. Hence, it needs a lot more variety to maintain its appeal for longer than that.

The most annoying part is that the level itself does not change over time, since no new obstacles or situations arise along the way. In fact, the only thing that changes is the speed of the main character, which cannot be controlled by you. Hence, it gets trickier to navigate the levels when you move a lot faster, but that’s about it, difficulty-wise.

In order to increase your score you have to keep running for as long as you can and collect the gems whenever possible. There’s no penalty for not paying attention to the gems, on the other hand, it the whole thing feels a bit pointless after a while. It’s also impossible to score combos or pick up power-ups, which would animate the experience or at least give you something to look forward to.

As for the graphics, they are pretty decent, given the fact that both the main character and the few 3D objects in the game are pretty polished. Again, there’s nothing else to see, on the other hand, so it makes no difference how good the graphics are. Not much can be said about the sound either, but that’s one element that could be ignored in this case if the rest of the game was more exciting.

Gem Hunter could have been a much more enjoyable game if it only featured more variety, especially since the controls are snappy and the mechanics are fluid. However, this is the kind of experience that gets stale after no more than five minutes of gameplay.