About Tower Of Hell:
Recently, I have felt that I simply do not like strategy games all that much. While they’re OK, I don’t feel they can hold a candle to action games such as Dark Souls, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, etc… This was kind of a sad revelation because I remember playing a decent amount of strategy games in my childhood. However, no matter how many times I gave strategy games a shot as I got older, I simply didn’t enjoy them that much. Playing Tower of Time however has reminded me of why I liked strategy games in my childhood and has helped me narrow down why I enjoyed them so much in the past. The main element that I enjoy in Tower of Time is that it gives me a sense of adventure. Despite action games being some of my all-time favorite games, none of them gave me a sense of adventure like Tower of Time did. I feel this is primarily because of the nature of difficulty in action games. Unless there is a levelling system where you do significantly less damage to enemies higher level than you, in action games, you can simply defeat the enemies the game throws at you by gitting gud. For example in Dark Souls, while there might be an enemy that’s more difficult than the others you’ve encountered in an area, if you simply practice enough against that enemy, you’ll eventually overcome them. This means that there’s no NEED to explore if you don’t want to. While I definitely enjoy the freedom of this that action games provide, Tower of Time has shown me that there’s something to be said for games to REQUIRE the player to explore. I played the game on its hardest difficulty, and that meant in the early levels, I simply could not beat certain encounters without exploring and getting better items. Instead of this feeling limiting, this made me look forward to what I might find. It’s like the game set a goal for me saying “you need to defeat this powerful enemy, so go out, become better, and come back to defeat them”. There was no specific item like “the master sword” that the game arbitrarily told me I needed to get in order to succeed. It could be pretty much anything: more gold to level up, gems to upgrade my existing gear or buy new gear, a quest that gives me entirely new unique gear, etc… This sense of challenge at every turn and the mystery of what I might discover to overcome these challenges was what provided this sense of adventure, and it was such a breath of fresh air. So this sense of adventure couldn’t have been possible without the game providing a decent challenge and providing multiple ways to overcome these challenges, and thankfully the game did both splendidly. In regards to the difficulty, each encounter required me to use all of the tools at my disposal and try multiple strategies. Maybe I wanted to rush to the enemies and kill them as fast as possible or turtle behind strategic areas and wait for the enemies to come to me. This was not at all the boring tower defense game that I was dreading this game might end up becoming. You’re constantly pursuing enemies and using your skills in strategic manners in order to win encounters. For example, it was very important to use taunt skills in order to interrupt an enemy’s channeling ability, without which I probably would’ve died. This game also has some very unique ways of using skills. For example, there’s an ability that allows you to draw a line and create impassable terrain. The length of this line is limited, so you need to decide whether you want to completely encircle a few enemies, taking them out of battle for a while, or draw a big line and delay multiple enemies but only for a while. In regards to providing multiple ways to overcome challenges, you can fight easier encounters in order to earn gold and gems. Gold is basically EXP as you can spend gold to level up your characters. Levelling up improves not only stats but also grants you access to new skills. Getting new skills is extremely important in the early to mid game, and you’ll immediately feel the impact of levelling up your character. The game allows you to re-allocate skill points as you wish, which is extremely important because you can upgrade each skills in 2 different ways. One skill path might for example be useful against bosses (e.g. single target) while another might be useful against multiple enemies (e.g. AOE). Gems allow you to do multiple different things revolving around gear. You can buy new gear, enchant existing ones, etc… Creating your own gear in the beginning is extremely important as you can create gear that gives you mana regen, which allows you to spam skills more often which is key to success in battles. The most exciting way to upgrade your characters though is through unique gear that you often get from completing quests. This unique gear is almost always vastly more powerful than regular gear, so you’re always excited to finish quests and look forward to the unique gear you might find. The game also does a good job of progressively making the enemies more and more difficult. There are 10 levels in this game, and in each level you’ll face new types of enemies. These enemies gain abilities that you really need to step back and spend some time figuring out how to deal with them. For example, some enemies might be able to reflect all elemental damage, and if that’s the type of damage all of your party members can do, then you may need to change a bunch of things before tackling the encounter. Not only that, but each level will also grant you a new companion to add to your party. What’s cool is that it felt like each companion felt irreplaceable. I always felt that the newest companion was so strong and I could never replace them, which made me look forward to how I could make each new companion as OP as possible. While the game does a great job of creating a sense of adventure through its gameplay, it also does this through its story. This is because the story is structured in a way as to discover what the hell is going on. You’re in a tower that’s been turned upside down, cast down underground, and there are magical enemies all over the place. As you progress deeper, you find the history of what happened and how it relates to the outside post-apocalyptic world. It feels like there’s so much to unravel, and it’s fun to piece together what’s happened as you progress in the game. All of the above are the reasons why I recommend playing this game. However, it’s worth noting that this game is not without faults. Specifically, the game loses steam at around the 6th floor both in terms of gameplay and story. This is because starting in the 6th floor, the encounters stopped being challenging. It’s worth mentioning that the 1st encounter on the 6th floor completely stumped me and I failed at it like 3 times. However, after spending a few hours upgrading all my characters and their gear, I never had a problem ever again. So there was no longer a sense of adventure through gameplay since I could pretty much go wherever I wanted, and I no longer looked forward to quests/encounters that might give me new tools to play with. I mean, from floors 1-5, I was carefully considering what abilities to use and when, what enemies to tell my characters to kill first, when my characters should temporarily retreat, etc…. From floors 6-10, I was simply activating a bunch of passive skills, putting the game to double speed, and watching all the enemies get destroyed. In conclusion, I feel this game is a lot of fun for the 1st 5 floors. Even floor 6 is a decent amount of fun because it was enjoyable to be in god mode for a few hours. However, as with any game, not having any challenge eventually became boring and I was simply playing the game from floor 7 onwards to see how the story would end. Unfortunately, the story didn’t satisfy me at all. Regardless, I had a lot of fun for more than 60% of my time playing this game, which is why I recommend this game.
