Tower of Time

Tower of Time is an impressive effort from a small team, offering up hours of classic isometric dungeon crawling. There are a dozen visually-distinct levels; an intriuging and well-written story; plenty of lore and world-building; a diverse party with plenty of banter and player-decisions; a deep yet easy-to-understand levelling and crafting system; some light puzzling; great presentation; but also a lot of combat that just didn't gel with me. The plot has you delving into an upside down tower, looking for a source of power to save a dying world. Your party - of up to four at a time - slowly grows over the adventure, with levelling and crafting requiring you upgrade facilities on the surface, using blueprints and gold you find below. Every upgrade unlocks new skills and boosts attributes, opening up new combat options. Gear is plentiful, and a simple tier and enchanting system will keep you busy min-maxing your characters (essential on any difficulty higher than "easy"). Notes, lore books, mysterious strangers, and many other encounters convey the story, and unravelling the story behind the fall of the tower had me pushing on, even more so than the gameplay at times. A lot of the characters and backstories are common fantasy tropes but the rare voice-acted cutscenes do a great job of framing the action. Unfortunately the combat - which uses a real-time with pause/slow-mo system - becomes tiring as this is both a long game and fights require you to defeat waves of enemies (sometimes with modifiers like enemy-spawning portals). Upon initiating combat, you're dropped into arenas of differing shapes and sizes, often with chokepoints and cover, opening up a lot of tectical options when paired with your party skills. Unfortunately there's very little visual feedback, making it hard to follow. On easier modes, this just becomes samey and tedious, on harder difficulties, the length of battles and lack of feedback can lead to sudden party wipes that frustrate.

About 90h of old school rpg fun. Especially for those who like tactical combat with diverse character build options. The game gave a lot of fun, though, I would not recommend to try to finish it in a single session or in a single week. It is probably better for regular short sessions, and that way it will provide you a lot of fun for a long time.

This is isomertric 3d third person dungeon crawler rpg, lore-heavy, story-heavy. There's puzzles, quests, party based combat, a hub, a leveling. It's more akin to NWN2 than Baldur's Gate, but it's good.

If you are missing the summer tradition of playing a long dungeon crawler a la Icewind Dale, this game is perfect for you. From combat to exploration, to the menus everything is fast as does not waste your time. I am enjoying the tactical combat a lot, almost more than Divinity OS 2. Do not expect much from the story but it is still serviceable. I am reducing a star because the sound direction is horrible, the combat sound is very basic without any weight, skills and weapons do not have an oomph to them, if you played Arcanum you know what I mean for it reminded me of that game immediately. But this my only problem with the game, for this price what you get is awesome.