Gems of War

Gems of War comes from Infinity Plus 2, the studio behind the original Puzzle Quest, and it applies that same match-3-meets-RPG idea at a much larger, live-service scale: collect troops, build teams around color-matching mana synergies, and fight through a large PvE campaign, a full PvP ladder, and ongoing guild content. Nearly twelve years after its original 2014 release, the game is still receiving substantial, numbered content updates — the most recent as recently as July 2026 — a genuinely rare pace of sustained investment for a free-to-play game this old.

A thin review count that undersells real depth

Before getting into what reviewers say, it's worth being upfront about a limitation: Steam's own review count for this specific storefront listing is surprisingly small — 83 total reviews across all languages — especially set against the game's scope, its 168 tracked achievements, and the extraordinary playtimes several reviewers report (multiple reviews here come from accounts with well over a thousand hours logged). That's a genuinely thin sample to generalize broad sentiment from with full confidence, and this review says so explicitly rather than treating a small handful of detailed accounts as fully representative of everyone who's played. What that sample does offer, though, is unusually detailed and specific for its size, and worth taking seriously precisely because the reviewers writing it clearly have deep, real experience with the systems they're describing.

Real strategic depth, with a specific ceiling

The praise in this sample is substantive: reviewers describe genuine strategic satisfaction in building teams around mana-generation synergies, and multiple reviewers specifically credit active guilds and an engaged developer team as reasons they've stuck with the game for years. But the most detailed review in the sample — structured, specific, and clearly written by someone deeply familiar with the systems — lays out two concrete problems underneath that praise. First, the AI-controlled PvE difficulty curve is described as starting trivially easy and then scaling rapidly enough to outpace normal player progression, at which point many players either spend money or quit — though the same review offers a specific, non-obvious workaround: switching to PvP, which pairs players more fairly and continues rewarding progression the capped-out AI mode no longer does. Second, the same account describes rarer troop cards as functionally superior to common ones in nearly every way, which strictly narrows creative team-building the longer a player collects — the game is most creatively interesting early, before the "best" team composition becomes increasingly predictable.

Server reliability and a UI complaint worth taking seriously

Beyond the structural balance issues, two more specific, independently corroborated problems show up in this review sample. Server connectivity is a recurring complaint from reviewers with very high playtimes rather than casual players bouncing off early — one describes needing to force-quit the application to recover from repeated timeout errors, and a separate, similarly experienced reviewer reports the same pattern "lately," suggesting an ongoing rather than one-time issue. Separately, one detailed reviewer reports a UI redesign causing a specific, strong negative physical reaction, stating plainly that the developers confirmed no intention of reverting or offering an alternative layout — a genuine accessibility complaint distinct from ordinary UI-taste criticism, and one this review couldn't independently verify further but is worth flagging exactly as reported.

Nearly twelve years, and still actively built on

Set against all of this, Gems of War's own update history is a real point in its favor: numbered content updates have continued on a roughly monthly-to-bimonthly cadence through mid-2026, and the same studio recently shipped a modern re-release of the original Puzzle Quest, "Immortal Edition," in September 2025 — evidence of a studio still actively building on its founding idea rather than coasting on a decade-old release. Few 2014-era free-to-play games can point to this level of sustained, still-current investment.

What the achievement curve confirms

Steam's own achievement data offers independent, if partial, confirmation of the balance complaints above. Of 168 tracked achievements, the earliest milestones sit in a healthy range — around half the playerbase reaches level 10 and collects 10 troops — but the curve drops off sharply after that, with dozens of deep-collection and high-difficulty achievements sitting at effectively 0%. That's consistent with the detailed reviewer account describing a game that opens strong and progressively narrows: a real, engaged core of players clearly pushes deep into the game's systems, but a much larger share appears to plateau well before reaching the rarity-driven, strategically flattened endgame the most detailed critical review describes. One reviewer's separate, unsourced claim that the game is manipulated by cheaters ("game cheats like hell") isn't corroborated by anything else in this review sample and is reported here only as that reviewer's own unverified impression, consistent with this fleet's standard for single, unsourced manipulation claims.

Where it lands

Gems of War rewards the kind of long-term investment its most detailed reviewers clearly have — genuine strategic depth, an active community, and one of the more sustained support records this review has covered. But the specific difficulty-scaling and rarity-power-creep complaints from its most experienced reviewers describe real structural friction, not just difficulty for its own sake, and the recurring server and UI-accessibility complaints are concrete enough to weigh seriously. Given how thin the available Steam review sample is, treat this as a genuinely promising free option worth trying rather than a fully settled verdict — the game clearly holds real, lasting appeal for the players who stick with it, and it's worth finding out firsthand whether that appeal extends to you.