The Basics

Play turn based Match 3 Swap and Match puzzles to defeat your enemy and unlock and improve your troops. In the puzzle games you need to make matches of at least 3 tiles by swapping 2 tiles. Making matches increases the stamina of your troops (the color of the tiles that are matched should match the stamina color(s) of your troops to charge stamina). Matching skulls does direct damage to enemies. Make matches of more tiles gives you more stamina and an additional turn. One the stamina of one of your troops is fully charged you can select to use the ability of the troop instead of doing a tile swap.

Difficulty

There are different challenges inside the game, and already early on you can go for tougher challenges, but these were (for me) too hard, as it requires to improve your team first. If you just use the main game path that is selected it also gets tougher, but from what I have seen you can improve your team along the way and you will still manage to make good progress.

Variation

The game has a huge amount of content, for example all the different troops and weapons, but also the guild, different game modes. The Match 3 game itself might have less variation than you might be used to from other Match 3 games, but the difference in opposing teams offers a lot of variation.

Visually

Interface in general looks well, but the font sizes and text representation in general is all over the place and quite distracting. From large buggles of text in small fonts, to big splashy texts. It is a small complaint for a great game.

Free vs Paid

Surprisingly little limitations for non spenders, it seems. Sure I expect you can improve your characters a lot faster by spending, but you can still do it without spending. It seems you can play as much as you want.

Is It Any Good?

I give Gems of War 9 out of 10 stars. This Match 3 game goes far beyong a puzzle game. Great if the RPG elements are your thing.