PopCap Games is known for making easy to pick up and play games that are very difficult to stop playing. Square Enix is a company known for making long character-driven RPGs with epic albeit somewhat clichéd storylines. Putting these two companies together on a project could yield one of the most addicting games ever created, or a muddled mess of blandness. In the case of Gyromancer the latter turns out to be the case.

At its heart Gyromancer is a puzzle game. More specifically, Gyromancer is Bejeweled Twist. This variant on PopCap’s popular gem-swapper changes the direction of your moves by rotating four gems clockwise instead of simply swapping two around to make matches. Gyromancer’s puzzles take the form of one on one beast battles. You never directly control your player character; instead you summon a creature to fight for you. Each creature has an affinity for a specific gem color and has strengths and weaknesses based on the color of the creature you are battling against.

This is where things start to go a little bit south. To do damage to your opponent you must match up gems and fill your beast’s action gauges. When this happens, an ability gem appears on the board and you must make a match with that gem to invoke the spell and do damage to your opponent. The trouble is your opponent does not have to do any of this to do damage to you. Instead, their action gauges fill up as you are working to make matches. When theirs inevitably fill up their ability gems show up on the board and it is then up to you to make a match with them before a certain number of turns go by, after which their ability invokes automatically. While it is nice that you don’t have to worry about your opponent moving your gems around and messing up a move you were trying to set up it feels as if this system slants the deck in your opponent’s favour.

Between levels you can go to the Summoner’s Den and purchase new creatures. As you progress through the game you’ll find new Gyro Codes which you can then use to summon new creatures at the Den. Each creature has a different set of abilities and affinities as well as a specific level cap. Summoning a new, more powerful creature isn’t a very difficult decision to make since when you summon that creature it will join your party at the same level as your player character, so swapping creatures out is something you should do on a regular basis. It’s not like you can do anything else with the money you earn.

The game does have magical items you can use to give yourself specific boosts or modifiers to the way the gems move. These items are very limited though and the only way to get them is to find them inside of chests. There is no in-game item shop that will allow you to purchase these items. Instead if you want an item you will have to put up 40 Microsoft Points. There is a right and wrong way of doing downloadable content and this is probably one of the worst ways of doing it. If the only method for obtaining items is a matter of luck then this will lead to player frustration and possibly a bit of resentment.

Finally Square Enix contributed the story to Gyromancer. To be very blunt, it is neither very interesting nor very well executed. The characters may as well be cardboard cut-outs and are not at all compelling or interesting. Worse still, the game’s dialogue feels like it would be more at home inside of a high school drama class. The story is told through still images of the characters talking. The trouble is it’s always the same images no matter what situation the characters are in. It leads to the player just being disinterested in what’s going on and continually pressing A to get to the next puzzle sequence.

To be fair, Gyromancer’s gameplay, that being the puzzle element of the game is solid. Bejeweled Twist always was. So if you own an Xbox 360 and you want to play Bejeweled Twist then you could do a lot worse than spending the 1200 points on it. However if you’ve got a PC, and if you’re reading this you obviously do, then you might be better served to just buy Bejeweled 2. It’s a shame, a Square Enix/PopCap collaboration could have been excellent, but this time around, it just didn’t work out.

Score: 6.5 | Suggestion: Try It

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About This Author: Filippo Dinolfo

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