Gems of Magic: Lost Family

Genre: Match-3 Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Gems of Magic: Double Pack bundle, along with Gems of Magic: Dwarf’s Destiny. It is also included in the Match 3 Adventure Collection bundle, along with Match Three: Pirates! Heir to Davy Jones. It is also included in the Super Puzzle Pack bundle, along with Candy 2048 Challenge, Jigsaw Fun: Piece It Together, Match Three: Pirates! Heir to Davy Jones, and Yum Yum Line.)

Gems of Magic: Lost Family is a family-friendly Match-3 Puzzle game released in 2019 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game features a story about a colorful fuzzball who gets parted from its family due to a sudden wind storm and must reunite with them by… matching gems given to it by a bird, for some reason? Yeah, the story really doesn’t matter here, this is all about the gameplay… which is basically just Bejeweled.

If you’ve never played Bejeweled, you’ve almost certainly played one of the countless games based on its gameplay of swapping adjacent tiles to create matching rows of three or more like-colored whatevers, in this case gemstones (just like Bejeweled). Gems of Magic: Lost Family sets itself apart… barely… by placing the focus on clearing certain types of gems and certain spaces on the game board within a specific number of turns.

The presentation here is at least decent, using bright, colorful 2D visuals that make it very easy to distinguish the different types of gems from each other (though less easy to see the spaces you need to be sure to clear in each level). This is backed by fairly quiet and somewhat generic fantasy-appropriate synthesized themes that are far overshadowed by the game’s loud sound effects. I suppose it works overall, but there’s nothing truly memorable here.

Gems of Magic: Lost Family does very little to distinguish itself within its genre. It has touchscreen support, which is nice, but it doesn’t have any sort of multiplayer. And it doesn’t help that there are a million and one games out there that play exactly like this. As such, the $10 price tag on this game is laughable, and you just know it’s only there to make it seem like a deal when the game inevitably goes on sale for the far more reasonable $2.

Even so, I’m not sure I’d recommend Gems of Magic: Lost Family even for only $2. There are numerous other Bejeweled clones on Nintendo Switch, even some quite good ones, even free-to-play ones like Gems of War. With alternatives like that, why even bother with an uninspired knockoff like this one?

tl;dr – Gems of Magic: Lost Family is a family-friendly Match-3 Puzzle game that’s basically an uninspired knockoff of Bejeweled, lacking in any interesting features or gameplay elements. As such, there’s no reason to play this over countless better takes on this exact same gameplay formula on Nintendo Switch.

Grade: C-

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