Cursed Treasure 2 Ultimate Edition — what’s that?..

In 2020 we partnered with Surefire publisher to create an updated and localized version of Cursed Treasure 2. And now it’s released in Steam and EGS.

Cursed Treasure 2 Ultimate Edition on Steam

Basically it was supposed to be the same Cursed Treasure 2 game with Chinese and other languages localization and a couple of extra levels. But then we thought — hey, the players will be really upset if they find out that we offer the same game again. So we decided to improve the game and to address the most noticeable issues for this re-release. It still wasn’t enough for some players to justify buyng the game again, because it looks the same, with same levels and enemies, but it’s really different.

There is a bundle with the original game in Steam that makes a good discount for these who laready purchased the original game, but we strongly recommend to play the Demo version available on the game’s Steam page to help you decide if the game feels different enough to buy it 🙂

Here are the changes so you don’t need to read through the whole thing to find this important info:

  • The most important thing: the game is totally re-balanced, including enemies, towers, skills and waves. So the levels are the same, but the waves and the whole experience are different.
  • There are 3 new levels added to the first three locations — so it’s not a new expansion pack, but some extension of the existing gameplay.
  • Now there are 3 gems instead of 5 and the rating requirements are changed: you get Brilliant if all the gems are saved, even if touched. This allowed to make the difficulty curve more comfortable.
  • Updated experience system: now you get experience even if you lose the level. The more enemies are killed the more XP you get. This ensures that the player won’t stuck and won’t need to grind on earlier levels.
  • Improved controls: coins and bottles pick-up with mouse over, auto-collection of bottles. This makes the scrolls misclicks rare.
  • Localization support — finally, the game will have Russian localization!
  • A new main menu background image was created to stress on the fact that the game is different.
  • A lot of small bug fixes and improvements.

Let’s now go through these changes in detail.

3 Gems and Brilliant

The original (the very first) game in the series had a subtitle «Don’t Touch My Gems» and the best rating on each level could be achieved only if no enemies even touched your gems. That’s fun, but it makes it really hard to balance the levels because the game designer must ensure that every level can be finished with «Brilliant» that in turn means that the player must kill all the enemies on their way to the cave. Of course, everybody wants to have it, so the feature that the enemy has to make the whole way back from the cave again doesn’t really work, because in many cases the player just restarts the level if an enemy touched a gem.

To address this issue we decide to let the enemies touch the gem. This allows better balance and makes the player fight for the gems even if the enemies are carrying them.

Additionally, we reduced the number of gems from 5 to 3 to make the level rating system clearer: each lost gem makes the rating worse, unlike the 5-gems rating. 3 gems saved — Brilliant, 2 gems — Excellent, 1 gem — Good.

The Balance

The game balance was not perfect. In many cases the beginning of a level was hard and the second half was easy. Usually the player could just watch the enemies being eliminated, doing nothing and piling up mana closer to the final waves. Some tower upgrades and skills were overpowered. In the Ultimate edition we tried to make it better. The whole balance is changed so that each enemy wave requires player’s attention. Together with the updated ratings system it resulted in more fun in every enemy wave.

Using Terror spell to make the enemies bring the gems back to the cave has never been so satisfying!

Mana auto pick-up

Golden coins are auto-collected in the beginning of every enemy wave in the original game, but mana bottles not. This was done because there is a mana cap and the mana bottles will just burn if the mana limit is reached. In many cases this resulted in the level surface covered with the mana bottles all over. That in turn was making it hard to activate scrolls because the player would usually click the bottle instead of the scroll or vice versa losing the important resource.

We decided to add auto pick-up for the mana bottles too to address this issue. In most cases with the new balance (ant updated skill that increases the mana limit) the mana won’t go over the limit, but if it does, it will go over the limit and slowly burn, allowing the player to use it.

20 комментариев к “Cursed Treasure 2 Ultimate Edition — what’s that?..”

  1. I would really love it if you guys gave us the option to play the older version with the old Templar ability and use the older (also significantly better and less cluttered) UI.

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    • Most probably you refer to the Flash version, don’t you? What was the old Templar ability? 🙂
      We had to re-create all the UIs when we ported the game to OpenFL since many features that Flash supported are not possible with the new technology.

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  2. Cursed treasure 2 is my favourite game, i almost completed it on steam i need to get brilliant on the deep levels (one achievement). Anyway about possible upgrades, for the game. I think. it would be great idea to make grand spells. usable more often, because at the moment players are forced to grind skulls. My idea would be to make skulls appear more often or decrease price a bit. Also i would like to suggest some bonus content, for clearing a game and clearing a game on all stars for example when you clear game, normally you get level editor and endless mode and after you get brilliant on all levels you get infinite usage of grand spells setting which you can turn on or off if players sees it fit just like in resident evil games when you clear a game you get either infinite ammo setting or unlimited weapons. So that would be suggestion to improve this great game that can be even greater.

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    • Skulls are not supposed to be used often — the game is designed so that the player can finish it without using Grand Spells. Grand Spells are for some emergency cases where the player made a mistake and doesn’t want to restart or so.

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  3. Cursed Treasure 2 was one of my favorite Flash games years ago and I’m so glad to see you guys are making a remastered version of it. A few suggestions from my point of view:

    1. Revert back to the old sounds and music globally, or at least have an option to do so. The new ones just don’t feel right.
    2. Also revert back to the old UI for the skills menu and evilopedia or have an option to do so. The new ones are a bit more busy looking and again, just don’t look right.
    3. I don’t like the new method of placing towers. Maybe at least have an option to enable usage of the old system (clicking the tower on the toolbar on the right of the screen, then clicking where you want to place it)
    4. Put mana pools back in the first few levels, they kinda need them.
    5. Some kind of randomized/endless mode that’s unlocked after finishing all the levels. It would help increase replayability.
    6. Long-term, a level editor might be fun 🙂

    Other than that, everything looks nice and I’m exited for the full release!
    PS. I’m not sure if this is getting added later, but please add higher resolutions for windowed mode!

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    • Thanks for the suggestions!

      UI/Controls were redesigned so that it works well both on PC and mobile. We want to be able to target multiple platforms with less changes.

      Ultimate Edition is designed to be harder than the original game, that’s why some Mana Pools and Gold Mines were removed. Please note though that it’s rebalanced. Meaning it’s not the same game but harder — it’s different 🙂

      Indeed, new features, like level editor or endless mode would be cool to add. Probably later 🙂

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  4. Hello Iriysoft i woul like to make some more suggestios, but this time about enemies. In cursed treasure 2 game there, are enemies called ninja, so obviuosly it would be great idea, to add samurai enemies also champion of samurai levels, would be samurai shogun and the boss of samurai levels, would be feudal lord that is also interested in gems. Thank you for reading, and i will gladly play the new Cursed Treasure 2 «Come enemies touch my gems».

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  5. Hello Iryi Soft. I do not have many suggetions left, but i do have a few more suggestion left. First i would like to talk about champion enemies in original cursed treasure 2 game steam version 2017 when i cleared this game i noticed that there are not too many champion enemies it is probably to make game more balanced, but i would like to think that there shoud be more champion enemies to defeat to increase challenge it probably is impossible to make champion enemies appear when normal enemies have to appear on their wawe, so i suggest making more champion enemies from 1 to 3 when it is time for champion enemy to show up in other words on their wawe. Second and propably final suggestion is to make enemies that are capable of destroying towers for example enemy shows up and the random built tower is automatically destroyed and to make matters worse the players would not be able to build any other tower on that same spot where is destroyed for a limited time. In all over game there wasn’t any enemies that would be capable of destroying towers the closest things were charm- towers unable to shoot templar ability to weaken tower damage, drill master the deep level champion is capable of shooting smoke screen and towers unable to shoot, that was closest idea. That would be all for my ideas. Thank you for reading all this

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  6. Hello Iriy Soft. I would like to give you more, suggestios about future levels of this game. First i mentioned that after The Deep levels there will be god boss with resurection ability, i thought of one idea by making players to fight the same boss twice, that never happened before, i mean players fight god boss and the god flees after first battle, and after second battle the players will finally beat him, of course getting to second god boss battle players have to beat other three bosses of the second map. Second after the god boss battle the towers (orcs, demons and undead) will figure out the truth behind gems and why they must protect three gems red gem symbolyses demon overlord power, green gem symbolyses orc overlord power, and blue gem undead overlord power, in truth three gems are the power source, of overlords and the humans, wanted to seal those gems away, not to steal them for their own gain, but the races figured this out too late since most human race is annihilated and now towers are betrayed by their overlords, and this is where the third map comes. Finally the final map is the world of demons, orcs and undead demon overlord used power of the red gem to summon two of his warlords, and two other overlords did the same thing in other word to get to three overlords players going to need to defeat all six warlords and after that players will finally encounter the final bosses of the third map and the whole game. Another suggestion i would like to give is giving demons and demon overlord immunity to fire this would make things difficult since meteor and fire tower is not going to work against demons and demon overlord. I’ am giving you suggestions in order to help improve the game if developers have another ideas on mind it is okay because i do not like cutting imagination short, because it is really hard when creator imagination is cut short and then development of the project suffers severe damage. Thank you for reading.

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    • I enjoy this game a lot on steam platform. I would like to suggest, a few interesting things for developers of this game. First i would like to suggest adding more levels and bosses, because boss fight with three dwarven kings proven to be interesing and worthvile, so i suggest making more levels where even the allmighty god is interested in gems and his skill would be ressurection which means fallen enemies will be revived this could prove a lot of difficulty since there wasn’t such enemies, that could revive others.
      Second i would like to suggest making a second map after the deep levels when dwarven kings are defeated in second map players would still fight against humans, but i would also like to suggest a third map where there won’t be greedy humans anymore, but greedy orcs undead and demons, in other words all towers will fight against their own kind and the final bosses of this third map would be demon overlord undead overlord and orc overlord with their skills.
      Finally i would like to suggest a possible way to make upgrade all skills to max because, it would be nice to have all skills at maximum level.

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