Perhaps the main thing why people love games from independent developers is that they often put the desire to make a memorable game above the desire to make money. Especially if this is the first project, which, although not financially successful, can still create a reputation for the new studio. The reputation of creators of niche games that will find a response in the hearts of gamers who miss genres marked with the sign of oblivion. While large studios do nothing but develop a proven formula over the years, afraid to retreat even a step, newcomers do not hesitate to confidently step where they want. Even if sometimes the chosen road leads straight into the abyss.

Finding pearls among the boring pebbles on a rocky beach is an important skill for the deluge of games released every year. Some discoveries are truly entertaining, after all, when else will you be able to see a real-time strategy, a smart quest or a classic dungeon crawler from companies whose names are tightly linked to the same brands? It’s all the more offensive to state the fact that indie projects, no matter how interesting they are, often go unnoticed: the struggle for attention in the gaming industry has turned into a real confrontation between marketing departments, reviewers and the target audience – players. It’s doubly offensive to read other people’s reviews in which the merits of a good game are presented in a negative light due to an unwillingness to dive deep enough into its systems or dislike of the genre as a whole.

This unfortunately happened with Tower of Time.

So I’m here to tell you my story, the story of the game, our story. What is the reason, you ask? The story needs to be told, the game deserves attention, and if no one talks about it, the very reason for the existence of this game and this review will be lost. Why now, when a lot of time has passed since its release?? Yes… You are right… But as players we are often in a situation where one game ends and another must begin instead. So this story can still live in this world. I’m a gamer and I’m a reviewer, I want you to listen to me, look at the game through my eyes and be able to judge it the same way I do. I want you to also give a verdict on the debut project of the Polish studio Event Horizon, the classic RPG of the “dungeon exploration” subtype, that same Tower of Time.

The surprisingly simple and highly addictive formula of a dungeon filled with equal parts monsters and treasure is as old as the role-playing game genre itself. Whether alone, as part of a group or as an entire army, the player descends into the darkness to pull out as much valuables as possible, defeat the villains who own them and return to the city to improve equipment and go deeper next time. Obviously, in order to steal even more, kill stronger monsters, and also strengthen equipment and heroes in order to repeat this again and again. This gameplay loop is extremely effective, it’s easy to become addicted to the process, it’s like a bag of chips – not a very healthy food, but it’s impossible to stop until it’s gone.

Careless handling of this loop is easily marred by mediocre implementation, which includes many inconveniences that cause loss of interest in the first iterations. This does not happen with Tower of Time, because its game design does not try to distract from what is happening, but rather, with each new element introduced, it immerses the player deeper into the process, as it should be. The game does a lot of things right and this is the best rating it deserves.

The plot, revealed by quite standard means, also plays an important role. The videos, collected from static pictures, combined with beautiful smoky transitions, are accompanied by a soulful low voice that tells about the dying world of Artara. One day magic appeared here and forever changed the direction of civilization. The inhabitants of the world, representatives of classic fantasy races, abandoned technology in favor of newfound strength, but alas, the side effects of using magic were illnesses and irreversible distortions of the very essence of the world. At the beginning of the story, the inhabitants of Artara have already forgotten what sunlight looks like, agriculture does not bring enough food, and the borders of once great empires are narrowing every day due to internal political conflicts and natural disasters. There is no longer any hope of salvation, but the player finds himself in the role of a little boy who accidentally discovered the entrance to the Tower that appeared out of nowhere, which it was as if a monstrous force turned over and stuck into the ground. A mysterious voice from the Crystal Throne inside the first floor promised the boy strength and power, frightening him greatly, but forever leaving in his soul the desire and desire to reveal the secrets of the mysterious Tower. Years later, the boy grows up, becomes an adviser to the king and, with his support, having gathered a small detachment, returns to the tower. Having rediscovered the throne and sat on it, he gains the power to see the world through the eyes of his comrades, control them in battle and influence their decisions during disputes.

This is where the descent begins. Ahead lie many battles and treasures, new allies, restoration of lost technologies of the past, and of course the main thing: an explanation of what the tower really is, what the gift of magic hides behind it and who owns the Mysterious Voice. The player personifies this particular grown-up boy and this makes the story of the game a little more personal.

Contrary to my usual desire to tell you as much as possible about the plot of the game, sealing it with an unsatisfactory assessment of the excessive use of clichés and hackneyed characters, this time I would like to refrain from such epithets. The game presents a typical fantasy setting, with a mixture of magic and mechanics, but with a claim to additional originality, expressed in the author’s unique races. Together with people, a wise and nature-connected elf, a typical gnome-mechanic in a group of adventurers, there lives, say, a frost giant, whose peculiarity is memory stored in the form of stones. There is a special emphasis on the characters and their culture, they constantly refer to their origins, enter into dialogues and the clash of ideologies expands the images of the heroes, giving them life. Considering that you are a passive observer and in most cases you, as a player, have no control over the progress of negotiations, capturing interest here is extremely important and the work of the scriptwriters can only be praised, since their task was done perfectly.

Tower of Time answers positively the question of how exciting and emotional the story of a seemingly simple dungeon exploration about destroying enemies and collecting treasures can be written. Concise lines of local plot surprisingly organically introduce characters, both you control and occasional NPCs. Their characters are well thought out, and light, unobtrusive humor woven into quests and dialogues brightens up the atmosphere of hopelessness of a dying world. Yes, of course, you can find fault with the behavior of the characters, the linear narrative, standard elements in the form of secrets, pseudo-unexpected betrayals, a number of climaxes and sudden turns that turn the meaning of the collected information inside out. But I don’t want to do this. Because the overall arrangement of the pieces is catchy. To ensure that, using ordinary means such as notes, minimally animated videos and dialogues against the background of static scenes, situations are created about which you want to say with a smile “wow, how cool.”!”- it’s incredibly expensive. And these scenes are on every floor here.

The authors truly love their project and this is felt not only in their approach to the plot.

Let’s turn to the structure of the game and draw some unexpected parallels with Heroes of Might and Magic, Disciples, or with King’s Bounty, which is more suitable in this regard. Like these projects, Tower of Time divides gameplay activities into a number of components: free exploration of the world, combat and the macro level, where I will include city development and squad management.

Exploration of the world takes place in real time and is really, really reminiscent of a similar process in King’s Bounty. Treasures are scattered everywhere in the form of piles of gold or chests with artifacts. You have to choose a route, carefully avoiding enemies that look too strong. The plot is revealed through notes, dialogues and quests, narration through the environment is actively used: the design of each floor reflects the purpose of the area, traces of battles or other events of the past are constantly visible. Part of the environment is highlighted as key points that participate in the plot or provide permanent bonuses – statues, fountains, scrolls.

As they travel through the Tower, the Nonukcasinosites.co.uk/review/spicy-jackpots-casino/ heroes become stronger. Their development is limited not by the presence of experience, but by the money collected on the floors, as well as by the level of buildings that must be erected according to the drawings found in the Tower. Plot-wise, this approach is explained by the fact that the characters under control are already the best warriors from this world, who do not need training, but the technologies of the Tower are so surprising that they literally open up new powers and opportunities for them, and therefore require money for implementation and training. The gameplay reason is more prosaic, so you need to look at the combat and role-playing parts of the game to understand why it was decided to abandon the concept of experience.

I’m a little unclear about the positioning of the game that the developers are promoting on their website and the game’s pages on Steam and GOG. The description contains words such as “innovative real-time combat”, “a new kind of RPG” and even the newly invented term “Arrow-Time”. Overly strong words that will raise eyebrows in anyone who is minimally familiar with the concept of a real-time battle system with a tactical pause – RTwP (and I like that acronym!). Examples of games with a similar approach include classic Infinity Engine projects such as Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, with the caveat that they did not have real real time, disguised as a system of rounds in which the character’s next action could be changed. Another example is the neoclassical Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny, which also used real time with low dynamics, expressed in complex processes that implement combat: the game operates in terms of “activation time” and “rollback time,” which again makes the combat somewhat different from what “regular” real time is. Therefore, the best analogue of how fights take place in Tower of Time would be the game Aarklash Legacy, also a very worthy and undeservedly little-known project.

Since I’m almost sure that no one really knows about Aarklash Legacy, I’ll give a clearer analogy – battles in Tower of Time are most reminiscent of battles from MMORPGs, where the basis of the role-playing system is the roles of a tank, fighter and support.

Each time you encounter enemies in the Tower, you will be transported to a separate arena where you must withstand attacks from waves of enemies whose appearance is extended over time. Less often, the task changes to destroying spawn points or defending fragile objects, but this happens much less often.

The combat process is tied to microcontrol and the use of pauses. Each of the seven heroes is tailored to one of the archetypes, so that the equipment and choice of abilities allow him to play the appropriate role. Adepts of the sword or ax are required to tie up the enemy with close combat, keep groups of enemies on themselves and prevent them from reaching the rest. Mages use area attacks to weaken groups and cause mass kills. Shooters must quickly destroy the most dangerous targets and finish off those who survived the massive attacks of magicians. Support summons creatures as additional distraction meat, heals and applies other effects that do not cause direct damage.

Each of the Tower of Time characters has at least two development options. The choice of abilities when creating a build is wide and is not limited to multi-colored special effects that knock numbers out of allies or enemies. There is a wide range of summoned creatures, several methods of crowd control, even combat abilities differ in form and principle of action. The most important thing is that all this must be actively used in order to stay alive and have time to destroy new and new waves of enemies. Different abilities suit different situations and the composition and capabilities of the team have to be changed regularly.

Assessing the importance of the role-playing components of the game, one can quickly come to the conclusion that the success of confronting enemies is determined by the priority of the ability-thing-characteristic. The importance of abilities has already been said, but this is only one part of three.

Items are closely related to characteristics and reveal a simple but effective system. There are only 4 attributes and none of them are useless for some characters, which is very nice. Strength determines weapon damage and armor penetration. Speed ​​is responsible for the frequency of attacks and cooldown time of abilities. Mastery enhances abilities and mana regeneration. Finally, health is related to the amount of damage a hero can withstand and further increases magic resistance. Things enhance all of the listed properties to a much greater extent than the characteristics do, and therefore turn out to be more important.

The variability of the role-playing system, various tools for obtaining equipment, as well as tuning this very equipment with its own nuances – all this creates a small paradise for those who like to dress up heroes in computer games. Thus, abilities can be modified by giving the main effect additional properties. For example, reducing the height of the wall created by the paladin Kane so that your fighters continue to shoot – of course, in this case the wall will no longer protect the heroes from enemy shooters. The random factor associated with obtaining equipment on floors and chests is not a problem, since the developed crafting system allows you to disassemble unwanted items into crystals in order to create the necessary item of the desired type and the desired focus (damage or protection in the simplest case). Then the created item can be strengthened with the help of an anvil and, finally, an enchantment can be cast, turning some ordinary sword into an uber-artifact of noticeable power. Equipment is divided into tiers and further divided into quality categories, with the “low”, “green” and “blue” categories not being useless due to their greater potential for reforging. And on the floors you can find special forges that increase the quality of the item.

The creatures opposing your squad are structured similarly. The variety of enemies is great, they are combined into groups that use approximately the same archetypes of melee fighters, marksmen and support mages. The fight against them consists of a rapid response and a system of measures and countermeasures. Despite the fact that characters can be allowed to move around the arena and update buffs on their own, this should not be abused. The player is required to constantly monitor the progress of the battle. At least in the beginning, temporary effects are too expensive in mana to leave them on auto. You also need to remove heroes from the zones created by enemies, maneuver, gather enemies together and follow the tactics for which your squad was sharpened – be it taking damage to the face, using healing abilities, or beautifully filling the crowd with fire.

The game has a very good balance of difficulty, which is what you would expect from a game whose progression is so controlled. By moving fights to a separate arena, abandoning experience in favor of money, and limiting character levels to special items that are discovered only at a certain stage, it is easy for the game designer to adjust the difficulty of the battle to the specific level of development of the group. The negative side of this approach is the noticeably reduced replayability, in light of the fact that you will always come to key battles with approximately the same resources, and due to getting used to the mechanics of the game, it will be perceived as increasingly easier.

This is despite the fact that at the first acquaintance I rated the game as difficult from the very first floors. There are constantly not enough resources in the form of mana, even the most durable character cannot withstand the blows of strong opponents, the damage dealt by heroes is low and battles have to be replayed over and over again. However, the general difficulty graph that I compiled as I progressed shows a very strong drop in the severity of battles in the area of ​​the fifth floor and a sluggish rise back until reaching the 8th, where each battle again becomes a test until the very end.

The explanation for this interesting phenomenon, which, by the way, is characteristic of all real-time games with a tactical pause listed in this review (that is, very high difficulty at the beginning, then a sharp drop in the middle and a new peak towards the end) lies in the very nature of RTwP. This nature lies in a kind of “law of small numbers”, the essence of which is that even a small increase in secondary characteristics during a long battle can have a significant impact on its outcome. Moreover, even the result of using powerful abilities may not be immediately visible.

If you contrast Tower of Time with any game with a turn-based combat system, for example, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and compare the number of actions and their weight within a certain conventional period of time, it is easy to see how significant the immediate effect of the applied abilities of each discrete move is and how difficult it is to evaluate the time-drawn-out result of your continuous actions. This is, first of all, a matter of clarity, even a person who is not too familiar with the rules, with a quick glance at the game situation, can assess how events will develop and what can be done – here you need to throw a fireball, treat this character, kill this monster first of all. But assessing a similar situation in a game, where ongoing continuous processes are important, is much more difficult. It seems that the character affected by regeneration can calmly stand under the blows of opponents, but what if there are more of them – how quickly will you notice that for the last minute he is slowly dying? What is more important – to deliver an instant blow with the same fireball or to change it, transferring most of the damage into an extended effect that will cause more damage in total?? Or it won’t if you can’t survive during this time. Assessing the effectiveness of combat can be quite non-trivial. Two tenths of mana regeneration per second seems like a small and insignificant bonus at first glance, but over 5 minutes of battle it means an additional use of an ability that may not be enough to win.

Thus, in real time, you are essentially playing tug of war with the computer, trying to tip the balance scales in your favor. Some abilities still allow you to make full-fledged dashes, such as the ability to make a team invulnerable, while others, on the contrary, complicate the situation, for example, giving allies’ weapons additional armor penetration. This is the root of the unpopularity of real time compared to the turn-based system; not everyone is ready to understand the processes of interaction between allied and enemy units on the battlefield, and letting the battle take its course usually results in a lack of understanding, which is why you lose over and over again. Around the same place is the definition of a tricky difficulty curve, specifically adjusted so that you appreciate and learn how to use basic tools, in order to then introduce new mechanics for which you will have to look for answers different from those that have become routine. This is the basic concept behind the mechanics of an RPG, but it’s important to understand the fundamentals behind real-time and turn-based combat, and I’ve tried to touch on those differences.

So, being a rare representative of the real-time tactics genre, Tower of Time does a lot of things right. But we should not forget that this is still the first project of a young independent studio, which has room to strive.

Yes, as I already mentioned, the authors really love their game and have endowed it with cute features that add nice touches to various aspects of its image. For example, each battle is preceded by a small text description that carefully explains who your heroes will fight with and under what conditions. Micromanagement outside of combat is kept to a minimum – there is no need to heal or resurrect characters after a battle, the inventory is common to everyone, and there is no need to move to the city to craft things. The choice of music is good for both combat and exploration, it is calm and a little melancholy, an interesting choice that creates a special atmosphere on each of the floors of the Tower.

However, a number of shortcomings still spoil the impression and it is not always possible to say unambiguously which of them relate to conscious decisions and which are mistakes.

Here, for example, are the unique relics found on the floors. As a rule, they differ little from ordinary crafted purple items, but for some reason they come with terrible fines. For example, a ring with a regeneration penalty of as much as 20 points per second or pants with minuses to resistance. The fate of these items is predetermined – they are useless and are disintegrated, becoming a source of crystals.

Or fountains that give permanent bonuses, both positive and negative. However, what are fountains with negative effects for?? They are easy to distinguish from good ones, they are always red or unhealthy yellow, in addition, downloading is always available if the bonus turns out to be bad. Pointless.

The so-called “key decisions” are also frustrating, when you have to influence the heroes under your control in their dispute. Whatever decision you make, you will always improve the value of your reputation with some and spoil it with others. This affects minor bonuses and penalties that affect the entire team in battle. Needless to say, very often you have to make a choice not in favor of roleplaying – and the decision may not be simple in terms of plot – but in the direction of the usefulness of specific numbers? And even so, without a guide or save-load, it can be difficult to assess how your heroes will react to the chosen “key decision”.

There are also many shortcomings in the interface. For example, you can’t see what abilities do before they become available by level. The composition of the group is allowed to be changed only before the battle or when leaving the city, but it cannot be changed just like that. Perhaps it’s my carelessness, but I still haven’t found how to do this. The interface during combat receives a “satisfactory” rating, and this is at best. Shows who’s attacking your characters, but doesn’t show who they’re attacking. Hero active effects are divided between their portraits, the right side of the screen, and the hover tooltip. At the same time, active positive effects on enemies are not displayed at all – you will be very unpleasantly surprised when you first encounter damage reflection. This coupled with the inability to stop the attack using standard means.

And, unfortunately, bugs and poor performance. The game may die immediately after loading a save. Obviously there is something even less critical; the “report a bug” item in the main menu is very confusing. You have to put up with poor performance too. FPS constantly sags, especially in combat, where there are a lot of objects moving and doing something, and the sound twitches when saving and loading. The interface is also not in order, windows and even tabs inside them open with a delay, and the number of lines in the enemy debuffs tooltip is not limited and can go off the screen.

But even in this form the game gets my warmest recommendations. If you are a fan of the genre, have long been a fan of Infinity Engine games, new creations from Obsidian, perhaps managed to get into the Dungeon Siege series and even found and appreciated Aarklash Legacy, you should not pass by!

Yes, of course, Tower of Time is not a game for everyone. She is a representative of an unpopular genre, she can seem drawn out and monotonous, and the positive aspects of her combat part are revealed mainly on the highest difficulty or in hardcore modes. In addition, like any representative of author’s projects, she has traits that she has to put up with. However, the potential is huge, and has already been perfectly revealed both in terms of the created world and in terms of gameplay solutions.

My story has an important meaning: at the very least, it’s worth taking a look at the Polish studio Event Horizon and waiting for its next project. Correcting design mistakes and technical problems is a matter of experience and practice. I’d like to see them build on the strengths of their debut.