Tower of Time (2018)

Playtime: 7,5 hours (abandoned)

Review

Ok, so i stopped playing this 2,5 years ago and i've just decided i'm going to uninstall it. It's a perfectly passable pause-based strategy game with a couple of nice ideas. This is the kind of game that gets a 5/10. Not bad, but not really worth playing either. It's completely linear and balance between the characters is kinda wonky. In a world with Baldur's Gates and Dragon Ages and stuff you'd have to be a real genre enthusiast to get something out of this.

5/10

I don't have the mental capacity to write a full review right now, but I want to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by Tower of Time. I described the gameplay in a previous status update and mentioned that the story was surprisingly well done -- I didn't even know the big early twists at that point. I'm generally more of a fan of character driven stories, and, truth be told, the characters aren't particularly strong here. However, the world building, overarching narrative, and mystery were all spot on, though, and kept me invested and guessing all the way to the end. I'd love to say more about it, but I think it's a story that's best experienced with little foreknowledge, so I'll just leave it at that.

So far, it's my favorite game I've played this year. I'm really looking forward to the developer's next game, Dark Envoy, now!

I've put about 12 hours in to Tower of Time so far and I'm really digging it. It's a CRPG dungeon-crawler with some fairly unique combat and a surprisingly intriguing story. The combat is kind of a weird mish-mash of traditional CRPG, tower defense, MOBA. The average battle sees you controlling 4 heroes, each of which has abilities that feel like they'd be at home in a MOBA, in real time with pause combat and fighting enemies that spawn in waves a la tower defense. It feels a lot more like a tactics game than your average CRPG, which is a plus for me. For a game that's all about descending a dungeon, the story is surprisingly well done, managing to build a world with mysteries that I actually want to learn more about.

I'd seen a lot about it being hard even on easy difficulty, so I was a bit worried about frustration levels going in. I actually had to bump it up to Hard fairly early on to maintain even a basic level of challenge in most fights. I think it's one of those games that if you crack character building, you really squash the difficulty curve, so experiences vary drastically.

Anyway, my main concern at this point is that I tend to lose interest in most games around the 30 hour mark, and this looks to be a 40 hour game haha.

I got this game for free on GOG and was excited to eventually give it a try.

After having it percolate to the top of my playing list, installed and gave it a go.

Likes:

• Very detailed art - beautiful sets and props and figures.
• Systems are super complicated and allow you to build out any kind of character you want, once you unlock them.
• Interesting combat varieties.

Dislike:

• Combat is hard. I mean, very hard. I played on the "easy" difficulty, and was still getting stomped. So I moved it down to the next lower (lowest) level called story and the combat was a joke... almost wish I could have just clicked through it and not wasted the time.
• Dialog is not very good. I only made it through the first three floors of the tower or so, and I just couldn't stomach the talking and forced intermissions of the interactions.

Overall, this game is not bad (except the hard combat, which might be more indicative of me being bad at the game)...but I saw what it had to offer, enjoyed it, and then decided to move on.

~David.