Tower of Time Reviews

+1

[h3]A Hidden RPG Gem.

It's surprising this game hasn't gone mainstream in 2018.

What even is this combat system? I figured this game would be TTRPG-esque. I was wrong.

Oh man, what a great idea poorly done. The idea of a upside down tower is great and I thought it would remind me of the old-not-so-forgotten diablo1 Cathedral, but.. Gameplay-wise it's REALLY boring. Very slow, very tedious and unbalanced. Story-wise it's also really boring. I got myself skipping through every dialog, as they felt similar to: "You are in a magic place in a magic year and have a traumatic childhood. Now you are magic! Go see magic! Do magic!" Like.. why? Why am I exploring this?

Truly enjoyable for about the first 75% of the game, then it drags on a bit too long. Inventory becomes cumbersome and hard to manage. I never even crafted one item as the game gives you a bounty of equipment to sort through. I picked a team of four (one tank and three dps) and never diverted unless the game forced me to do so. I leveled up everyone and made sure every character had some good gear and skills but in the end, my core four where enough to finish the game without any issue. For me, 50 hours of gameplay and bought on an extreme sale makes for a recommendation.

The game play is boring and not well balanced. The writing and story are awful. I feel stupid for having played it so long.

It was a pretty quick play on easy story mode, but I could see how one could sink many hours into this fairly expansive linear RPG. (Picked it up and beat it in about 16 hours). I considered trying it on a harder difficulty, but the will just wasn't there. Pros: * The tactical combat is pretty fun. Picking a party that complements each other from the available options was a fun puzzle. The mostly autopilot combats once I had a good team were enjoyable for me. * Itemizing characters was pretty fun. The variety of characters available and their equipment options was fairly simplistic, but still encouraged enough creative space to really optimize a style for them. While some items can be crafted, it was exciting to find items with enchantments that you couldn't craft, so it made looking through the loot worthwhile. * Some cut-scenes and dialogues are skippable. Not so Pro: * At the start of every combat, you have to set up your initial summons and auto-recasts. Would be nice if it remembered settings from the previous battle, and if all abilities could be on auto-cast. * Even on "fast exploration mode" walking around and especially backtracking felt like a big time sink that was not fun. * Eventually items started to feel a bit bland. I started looking for specific modifiers on items (e.g. attack speed, skill damage), then otherwise they just started piling up/cluttering my inventory. * Not all cut-scenes and dialogues are skippable (forces you to watch some slow animations). Summary: Worth playing at least as a once-through, although I personally don't feel very compelled to re/play it.

Tower of Time's gameplay is a good concept that feels unpolished and a little undercooked. I can see what they were pulling from, the combat in this game makes me think of WarCraft 3, specifically the missions where you only have a handful of hero units to work with, each with their own abilities and characteristic that make them unique. On the face this seems great, the problems come in with how they try to implement it. The game is 90% combat but you fight in the same arenas over and over again. The actual combat is kind of lacking, unit barks are muffled, its the sounds of combat are nonexistent so there can be a huge melee of your dudes and a bunch of angry skeletons and there's no clanging swords or other notable sounds of physical abuse. There's the occasional twist on the formula but over all it's very repetitive. The skills similarly also seriously lack oomph, bursts of ice magic and explosions, while effective, don't really have any pizazz and end up feeling limp. Exploring the overworld between fights is pretty interesting, and its a neat way to have good gear hidden by secrets for you to find, you can also find little piles of gold all over the place to nickle and dime your way into having enough to upgrade one of your characters. The problem being that it's still takes a distant back seat to the combat in terms of importance and how much of it there is. There are also some challenge fights you can do for gear and to test character builds, but they're more or less the same as regular fights but with boosted stat numbers, and the're presented as a literal checklist of stuff to do, like a chore, instead of being something to make the player go "HMMMMM" and consider beating on orcs and skeletons for cool rewards. I want to like it, it's working with a formula that I know can work, but I think the way it's put together doesn't really tap into that potential and it falls flat as a result. It might work for you but it just doesn't click for me.