Tower of Time

Like many others I got this as a freebie and decided to try it out for grins and giggles not expecting much. The intro had me groaning a bit as it's pretty cheesy but after I got a couple of hours into the game I realized I that this is a well thought out and impressive piece of work. It's a quality game and I would have been more than happy with it after a purchase. Why it hasn't gotten more hype and attention amazes me and not in a good way. It's a splendid mix of old and new and more than worth $25.00 as I'm honestly loving it so far. Every time my team gets destroyed it just make me even more motivated to dig into the systems and my party makeup and try again. The battles can certainly be a challenge that makes you change things up and implement strategy on the fly. Go in with a plan only to see it wrecked, turn things around just to see things are even harder than you thought so... Yeah. I'm loving this game.

..Pleasantly surprised and damn that GOG 40 character limit on titles. I went into this game thinking I was in for a deep tactical RPG. Well, it's far from it. Let's pick it apart: 1) Combat This is the thing you will be doing for most of the game. It is a real-time-with-pause style combat but where you need to "dodge" aoe attacks. Similar to Aarklash Legacy but worse. While AL rewards you for positioning and timely use of skills, here it feels like a hack&slash. I had to up the difficulty to the highest one and even then it was mostly walk in the park. The worst part is that the combat drastically increases the time it takes to finish the game. 2) Itemization and skills This part was fairly well done. You can refund all skill points and place into something else at any time with no cost and some of the skills are pretty fun. For example you get to draw walls and encircle enemies in, trapping them or wall off choke points to block archers at shooting you. Items are similar to ARPG, lots of stats, but somehow they are more meaningful than +3% boost to this but -1% penalty for this. With items and skills you can truly make killing machines. 3) Story and character development The story is really something. It breaks off of traditional narratives and is the game's strong point. For me the story alone was worth it. And although it had some misses, I truly loved how different and fairly deep it is with it's multi-level reveals. The characters don't of start strong, but i must say, by the end this game made them feel more alive than some of the AAA counterparts with a fraction of overall dialogue length. 4) Graphics and environment The maps are pretty large and the environments are so diverse I couldn't always believe how much effort was placed into this. I truly commend the artists that worked on this project. Overall, I liked this game a lot. If you are a fan of RPG and good stories give it a try, although I wished it had more complex combat or less of it.

This game is pretty solid, overall. But it does have some glaring flaws. It's fun, there is a lot of strategy involved, the gear system is rich and complex, yet not obtuse or hard to understand. This game can't really be compared to anything I'm familiar with. It's not Baulder's Gate, it's not Diablo, it's not a Rogue-like. In fact, all of the levels are prebuilt. There is no procedural generation at play here. The only things randomized are gear drops. Combat is fun. The ability to pause or slow time in order to plan your tactics works. You'll never lose a party member because hectic combat meant you couldn't get to them to keep them alive. If you die, it's entirely your fault. The difficulty is a bit undertuned. I played my first time on Normal (the 3rd of 5 difficulties) and I rolled through everything. My tanks took no damage and still managed to dps as hard as the dedicated dps. The gear/stat system is a treat for those who like to min/max and theorycraft about gear upgrades. I'm sure half of the 53 hours it took me to beat the game was spent sorting through my gear, trying to find what would maximize my characters efficiency at murdering baddies. The biggest weakness of this game is definitely the story. The plot is weird, but it had potential. There was an interesting back and forth going on trying to determine who was the real antagonist. It will keep you guessing. There are some unresolved plot threads involving a secondary NPC which is frustrating. But the biggest frustration was the ending. I feel like the writers were going for an epic, deeply meaningful ending, but it fell flat and felt unfulfilling. Don't expect a payoff once you finish the end cinematic. The writing also suffers from "stealing" from nerdculture. Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Warcraft, everything gets ripped off wholesale. There's a line between homage and outright ripoff and there were aspects of the writing on the wrong side of that line. Recommended if you get it half price.

I would have never expected to have sooo much fun with this game, i got it in a giveaway but after playing i totally would have paid the full retail price. The story is very attractive and compelling, the gameplay is smooth and fun. The soundtrack is very immersive and even though there are but a few tracks, it never gets old throughout the entire playthrough. The approach on combat feels fresh and is very entertaining since positioning is a key element of the battles, as well as comboing your heroes skills, therefore every battle has a different strategy to it. Not a whole lot of build crafting since the stats are pretty straight forward and each character attunes to some of them better than other. Same goes for gear, lots of trash loot, untill you hit the spot with something rare and unique. Exploration feels rewarding and is very easy to carryout since you always have access to a map where you can check which paths are left unexplored, and if you do it well there is rarely any backtracking, so you can kind of always move forward. I enjoyed the puzzles quite a bit since they are just difficult enough to demand the use of 1 neuron, therefore they can be completed if you just stop for a second to look at it. It took me 56 hours to complete my first playthrough on epic difficulty (it didnt feel difficult at all, i would not recommend playing on any other difficulty because it will probably be a walk in the park). Every map feels completely different from the previous one, so i never felt like i was doing the same thing over and over, and as you move along the maps become more intricate and interesting. The only minor thing to point out is the ocassional crash, happened to me around 8 times during the entire playthrough. Overall a fantastic game, i strongly reccommend you give it a try!

Spent 60 hours playing it, i say it's worth it. It's relatively easy on normal difficulty, and because of this fights become repetitive around mid-game. But i kept playing because of the story.