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Tower of Tedium

  • Sgt M
  • 02/10/2014 04:02 AM
  • 1432 views
I'll be honest: sometimes, I like to help out the little guy when it comes to playing games on RMN. I take pride in downloading some of the more obscure, oft-forgotten games with only a handful of downloads and not a lot of content. Every so often, I'll find a nice little gem that keeps me busy for hours.

But I'm sorry to say that Tower of Immortals was not one of those games.

Tower of Immortals is a simple game that prides itself on its beefy campaign: the titular tower sports over 100 floors to explore and four characters with definitive roles. Now, you may be thinking that 100 floors worth of content isn't that bad of a deal, considering that many of these smaller games last you less than an hour. But there isn't exactly a whole lot here to write home about.

To start, virtually all of the floors that I explored used the same, small tileset consisting of, at most, 10 different tile graphics. While I commend the creator for keeping things consistent, there weren't very many activities to do besides open a few treasure chests and play the "find the invisible wall" game that we love so much. Some of the layouts of the twenty-something floors I explored were interesting and creative, but almost all of them still boiled down to opening a chest, fighting a few random encounters, and dancing my merry way up the stairs.

At least, I eventually did that when I was strong enough to progress. Tower of Immortals starts you off with four incredibly weak, faceless characters who are barely able to survive two or three battles without stopping to grind it out. Most of my party, whom I can't even recall the names of because your characters have virtually no part in the story, died in about two well-placed hits at Level 1. Thankfully, I was able to ascend the first ten floors of the tower after grinding on the first floor until I hit about Level 3, after which I was faced with a boss who could still virtually one-shot anyone in my party and inflicted them with paralysis if they survived. While level-ups felt significant (Your HP and MP nearly triple between Levels 1 and 2), I journeyed through the tower always feeling helplessly underleveled. After the tenth floor, I was faced with a new tier of enemies which proceeded to wipe the floor with my party just two steps in. Pair this with very low Exp and Gold gains and my experience quickly turned into a tedious struggle.


Oh, so that's how it works.

Visually, the game is a bit of a mixed bag. The creator went for the whole Phantasy Star motif, using assets from said classics and modeling the entire aesthetic around it. Unfortunately, this is plagued by consistency issues: the music is comprised of Mystic Quest remixes and some of the boss sprites seem to be blown-up monsters from Lufia 2. And, again, the tile set is extremely minimal with awkwardly small character sprites running around. I do believe quite a bit more could've been done here, and playing "spot what game this is from" never works terribly well when you're trying to make a serious game.

As far as the story goes, well, I'm not quite sure what's going on here. It's an extremely barebones plot: Someone took over the tower, and my entourage of stock characters needs to go kill them. What little plot there is was drowned out by spelling and grammatical errors to the point where I didn't really care what was going on.

I would feel bad if I ended this here without at least some praise: The battles do look quite nice and look convincingly like I was playing Phantasy Star 2, which is an artistic style that I don't think we explore enough of. I have to commend the creator for showing some appreciation for this often-forgotten series in a sea of Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests. With a bit of cleaning up and some more tiles, it would have been a decent Phantasy Star game.

The idea of a 100-floor tower is a novel and exciting idea and I can tell the developer at least tried to make the lengthy adventure interesting with what few assets they used. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to keep my interest for the whole game, let alone a quarter of it. I have seen that the developer went on the create the much-improved Island of Farnor for the Crash Course contest last year, and I'm glad to see he has improved since this project. Zergar certainly could've done a lot worse for his first project. I guess we all have to start somewhere, though.

Rating: 1.5/5

Posts

Pages: 1
I saw the title of this review and thought that "Tower of Tedium" was satirically the actual title of the game. However, I wouldn't think it an attractive title in the first place...
Pages: 1