Gem Crash from Double Drive is a colorful arcade-style puzzle-ish game on Nintendo Switch. Learn more about it in our Gem Crash review!

 

The gameplay is straightforward. All you need to worry about is using the L and the R buttons to spin the level so that the balls that are in play can move around the field one bounce at a time. These balls are called crasher balls and, as their name suggests, they will crash into gems and destroy them – hence the name of the game. You can add more balls to the playing field by destroying specific power spheres that will unleash one extra ball on the screen, and the more balls that are in play, the bigger your scoring potential.

 

You will notice there are different colors of gems, and that they’re also of different sizes. The normal gems are the ones that sparkle white, and these don’t add much to your score. Next up are the hard gems, which are green, and these will boost your score but require you to hit them several times. There’s also a gold gem that rewards you with more points than the green one, but it’s bigger and will need to be hit many times before it breaks.

 

There is going to be either one or more prism gems on the playing field, and hitting them several times will increase the Fever meter at the bottom of the screen. Once you break the prism gem and fever time begins, you will have a set amount of time to hit the bonus gem – the big red gem that pops up – and if you destroy it, you will get a big boost. If you’re fast enough in activating the bonus gem and destroying it, a new set of prism gems will pop out, so that you can destroy it again and activate fever time, this time around with a much larger and sturdier bonus gem to break.

The gems you destroy will be added to your overall gem count, and these can be used for two things. The first one is the customize menu, which you can access by pressing the R button while in the area select screen. By spending gems, you will be able to boost the crasher balls’ attack, speed and penetration power. You can also boost them with skills such as an explosion, which makes the ball detonate a bit, or area attack, which deals some extra damage around it when it hits a gem. Gems can also be used to add power-ups before going into a stage, but to do this, you also need to level up to the required level to open up each power-up for purchase.

 

To be able to play more of the game’s stages, you will first need to level up and reach certain milestones so that another stage can open up for you. There’s only one stage unlocked when you get started, with the second stage opening up when you reach level ten, the next one when you reach level twenty-five, the third one when you go to level forty-five, and the last one when you reach level seventy.

Overall, there’s nothing wrong with Gem Crash. The issue is that it doesn’t have a big variety of stages to play, and having content locked – and having to level up to unlock it – means you’ll be replaying stages over and over again as you slowly make some progress. That’s closer to an arcade-style experience, so if that’s what you’re looking for on Nintendo Switch, and the trailer in this review has caught your attention, then give this one a go.

Disclaimer
This Gem Crash review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Double Drive.