The Gem Collector is a 2D Collect-a-thon platformer released for the Wii U on September 8th, 2016. You may remember the developer, Treefall Studios, as the makers of The Perplexing Orb, which still stands as my lowest-scoring review to date. Now like I said in that review, I really wanted this game to be good. And things were looking up. Eli Brewer, head of Treefall released a few developer commentaries showing that this was something he was focused on making and that he was taking his time with it, which are some of the things I suggested he do in my previous review. And this game is definitely an improvement over The Perplexing Orb. Is it enough to redeem Treefall Studios? Or will this be the final nail in their coffin? Let’s find out in my Mighty Review of… The Gem Collector.

    Alright, let’s start with the good. Presentation-wise, this game is much better than The Perplexing Orb. It’s clear that Eli hired a great artist to do the backgrounds and some of the sprites. The backgrounds are surprisingly varied and really nice to look at for the most part. The animations on some of the gems are really smooth and sometimes even look professional. I mean, check out this awesome snowman! The music is better this time too, with some decent tunes thrown in there. The controls are also better. The main character is very responsive and it’s easy to control where he goes. The game is also longer than 20 minutes this time. Clocking in at around 90 minutes for a 100% completion. With that being said, I want to point out that I said most of this stuff is just better. There’s a reason for that. This game… is bad.

    I’m going to start the bad stuff off with the music. Yes, there’s a decent track or two in here but most are just a bunch of loops someone made in FL Studios piled onto one another. I mentioned before that some songs are decent, but none of them are really memorable and a few are just plain awful. Same goes for the sound effects. Some are fine, if a bit simple and repetitive, but there’s a huge lack of variety. The effects may have been less repetitive if the different gem values related to different notes being played or if different monsters made different noises when killed. Oh, and there’s no sound effect when you jump. Sigh. And we’re just getting started.

There’s also the graphics. I mentioned that the backgrounds are really impressive, but that just ends up showing off some of the terrible sprites in front of them. To start off, the main character. The one thing that you see throughout the game and he looks like a potato held on top of a half-filled potion bottle? If the kind of polish put into the backgrounds and gem animations were put into this guy, the game might have felt less like an online flash game. The enemies look terrible.

Okay, okay. Believe it or not there is a story. Let’s take a look, shall we? Just gotta finish the level and... What? Are you kidding me? Look, if you want to have a block of text tell your story at the beginning of your game, be my guest, but don’t have the game skip the story when the player finishes the tutorial level without giving me a button prompt. You can’t even go back and play this level again, so the only way to see the story again is to restart the game, which you can’t do without deleting your first game. Either way, I am NOT playing this shit again, so here’s the story from Metacritic: 

“Embark on an adventure as Nomi, the volunteer gem collector from the Earth Tribe. Run, jump, fight enemies, solve puzzles, and collect gems in over 21 levels. Enjoy the 2D platforming madness with a friend, as the entire game can be played with drop-in and drop-out Co-Op. Push your skills to the max with hundreds of collectables to find and “instense” situations to maneuver through. Any fan of “tradional” 2D Platformers will be right at home with this game, get ready, and start collecting!”

Anyway, it’s about time we moved on to the next set of problems this game has: its gameplay. As I said before, the game has better controls than the Perplexing Orb, but that doesn’t exactly make them good. They’re not terrible, but they are weird. You use B to jump NOPE! Wait, hold up! Whyyyy? Why make the jump button B? It’s always A, everyone uses A. On top of that, to do a short jump you have to hold down the left trigger. Again, Why? Why is there a button to hold for a short jump? Typically the height of a jump in a 2D platformer is determined by the amount of time the jump button is held down. It’s been this way since Super Mario Bros. because having to map an additional button just to low jump is much more convoluted.  Finally, the jump is really parabolic. There’s no gravity giving a sense of realism to the world. When you jump the vertical speed almost seems constant, again making the game control like a free online flash game. Making movement feel natural and fun is the most important aspect of a platformer to get right, making this a perfect example of bad prioritization and not understanding your genre. Just like, 5 minutes of googling could have given you the code to implement normal, natural jumping into your game! Ugh, anyway, you hold Y to sprint, and press A to enter doors. 

You can also fire a beam out of your stomach and your ass at the same time with the right trigger. You change the type of beams you fire by pressing the different buttons on the D-pad. You have your standard magic shot, a fire shot which can light torches to open doors, and electricity, which can power switches to open doors. These also have some issues in that they’re shallow. The limited use of these shots gives the illusion of depth rather than actually making the gameplay richer and more fun, you’ll never use more than one type of beam in a single level, and the beams have a limited number of shots. At least with infinite ammo you could have gone all Rambo, but for some reason that’s not allowed. Killing enemies isn’t satisfying, opening doors isn’t satisfying, and there’s no real REASON for any of this, it’s just a shallow mechanic that serves to make the game less fun.

In addition to this, some levels have a parrot follow you around, which you can switch to with X. He can fly around the levels to collect pink gems and flip switches. His appearance in a world is sporadic, so he’s kind of a pointless gimmick, but he’s harmless. The only issues are that he moves a bit too slow with no way to speed him up, and he is fond of teleportation. Aside from that, the player can also zoom in by pressing in the left stick. It does this weird thing where it zooms to the center of the screen and pans down, rather than just zooming into the action. Doing this repeatedly will give you motion sickness, so I don’t recommend it.

    If that wasn’t enough of a disaster, player 2’s controls are completely different. A does a short jump, B does a high jump, shooting causes the player to jump for some reason, and he also sprints by default, with him slowing down when Y is held instead of speeding up.

Finally, the worst problem I have with the controls is that if you run into a wall and keep holding the run button, you hang on the wall. You can’t jump or anything, just hang there. This means that if you’re trying to get up on a ledge and hit a wall on your way up, you’ll freeze in mid air as soon as you touch a platform and be unable to do anything besides fall to your death. In a normal game, if you want to get into a small hole you just had to keep holding forward until you slide down and into the hole. Here, you have to hold forward, then release to fall down, then hold forward again to try to get in, then release over and over until you manage to get inside rather than sticking to the wall. This leads me to believe that rather than a feature, this must be some sort of glitch where the player gets stuck on the wall that the programmer didn’t know how to fix, so they added some text and called it an ability instead.

Each of these issues is something that should have been found and fixed before the game was released. And even worse than the gameplay are the level designs and bugs I found. In each level the player’s minimum objective is to collect all three big gems and get the key at the end. This sounds simple, but these levels are designed to be frustrating, not fun. To replace the lack of a fun platforming challenge is a bunch of cheap segments, glitches, and nonsensical design decisions that are only emphasized by the bad controls just mentioned.

First, the lives and health are the same thing, so when you get hit by an enemy you lose a heart, but if you fall to your death you also lose a heart. And when you start a new level you have three lives by default, regardless of how many you had when entering the level. Why do this? Most levels have 2 hearts sitting near the start anyway, so why not just have the player start with 5 hearts? On top of this, just like in Perplexing Orb there’s no delay between death and respawning, meaning if you were walking when you fell off and get respawned on a tiny platform, you’re likely to lose two lives instead of one. You can even lose lives in the hub world! Look at this!

Speaking of the hub world, if a level is locked and you walk over to it, there’s no way to tell what you need to do to unlock it. No list stating a number of keys, or gems, or treasures to let you know what’s necessary to proceed. And why leave hearts around the hubs for the player to collect if they’re just going to be taken away at the start of the level anyway?

The enemies are little to no threat unless they’re placed unfairly. Like look at these two on the stair. How am I supposed to get down there and hit them both before getting hit myself? None of them require different strategies or methods of attack, just get next to them and shoot. They also have weird hit boxes. I’m totally hitting this blob guy here, but since I’m too close to him the shot doesn’t register. Between this and the odd platform placement, the gameplay is incredibly slow and tedious to play through. And the boss battles with the “tiger” and final boss are just plain bland.

Lastly, the producer said this game would make for a good speed running game. So why are there auto-scrolling levels? These types of levels are usually poor to begin with. They slow down gameplay, being a speed runner's worst nightmare, but adding into that the slow scrolling, the unfair platform placement, the fact that it doesn’t start to scroll until like 5 seconds after the level starts, and the fact that the game glitches when you die on one of these levels and you lose all of your lives instead of just one and you can see that these levels are just a complete mess. Come to think of it, all of the vertical levels are auto-scroller and rather than having the screen scroll with the player the player simply flies offscreen, so let me take a guess here. The programmer couldn’t figure out how to make the game scroll vertically with the player’s movements, so they made it scroll automatically instead. This gets really annoying when you get past the top of the screen and the game won’t allow you to continue upwards. This means taking risky jumps without being able to see what’s above you and a lot of waiting for the level to catch up to you.

You may be wondering why I’m being so hard on this game. The answer is simple. It was way too easy it was for me to find major issues in only one playthrough. All of the issues I mentioned here could have been easily fixed with like a week of tweaking, but instead Treefall Studios felt okay putting this out on the eShop with many of the same problems the Perplexing Orb had. These are all things that should have been fixed before the game was released. 

It’s lazy, rushed and should be much better for a console release. I even went back and restarted the game to try and rewatch the story and just like in the Perplexing Orb the game didn’t even ask if I wanted to delete my old save. It even defaults to New Game when it’s started meaning it’s entirely possible to accidentally delete your save file by mistake when trying to play! This, along with the continuing problems from the Perplexing Orb just go to show that Treefall Studios has no intention of fixing past mistakes and ultimately, even though the game is only four dollars, I will present the same argument I gave in my Perplexing Orb review: 

You can play better versions of similar games for free online. And if you want to come after me for criticizing an indie developer, go right ahead, but I know of apps and smaller games that were only developed by one person and they’re fantastic, so this game has no excuse. That’s why my final rating for The Gem Collector on Wii U is… 3.5 shitty tigers, out of 10. It’s not as bad as the Perplexing Orb, but it does show that Treefall is just exploiting people on Kickstarter to make a profit while they churn out shitty games. And you can bet your ass that when the next one comes out, I’ll be ready to review it for you. I hope you all enjoyed this review. If you did, be sure to subscribe for more gaming videos and be on the lookout for next week’s nifty recipe based on this game. But until then, have a mighty nifty day today!