I encourage everyone to play through the game a few times before reading the comments. It's more rewarding making your own conclusions before reading everyone else's.
I enjoyed this game much more than the first one. The shift-jump took out pretty much all of the frustrating pixel-perfect jumping that had been hindering the first game.
The pixel-perfect jumping required on the last few levels was really not an appropriate way to increase difficulty. The game was great until the last level spoiled it.
Actually, you can get even more experience from doing nothing on experience mode if you create a bunch of low level gems and summon enemies (spread out over a few waves). This does not count as gem bombing, so you can still get that amulet. Also, if you have enough mana, you can get a better bonus by destroying all of the buildings on the map.
However at high levels, it's much faster to just complete the lower level 3x bonuses that you had not already completed.
Usually I find that puzzle games like this get boring pretty quickly. The plot is really effective as a motivator to continue playing, even though it's just text.
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