Tower of Time - party-based real-time isometric dungeon crawler

[fantadomat]

Is the exploration interesting,are there any secrets and hidden places? Also how is the story?

 

[Bara]

Games okay but not for me, had to refund. For what little I did play (only two floors and some challenge fights) the story was okay, art is nice, but i couldn't tolerate the combat for long.

The constantly spawning mobs ruined the pace of combat for me as running to opposite sides of the encounter maps or waiting for them to reach me felt tedious.

Also, the C&C decisions so far were kind of a joke only have done two tho. First one was okay I get how a party member could find it disagreeable that you force a spirit already in pain to speak more to gather more information. But the second decision is "lets bash this orc totem with swords!" says the warrior. "No lets do it with magic" says elf druid. The one you side with increases their commitment to the quest and the one you disagree with looses one point of commitment which shifts your combat bonuses.

Maybe end game total level of commitment to the quest will change the stories ending but for the warrior to have his level of commitment on a quest to save his planet because you decided to bash a totem with magic instead felt silly.

But again I only did two floors and I wasn't really patient with the game, I was getting flash backs to dragon age 2 and at that point I was just out. I still can't believe I played that garbage to completion.

 

[Whisper]

Games okay but not for me, had to refund. For what little I did play (only two floors and some challenge fights) the story was okay, art is nice, but i couldn't tolerate the combat for long.

The constantly spawning mobs ruined the pace of combat for me as running to opposite sides of the encounter maps or waiting for them to reach me felt tedious.

Also, the C&C decisions so far were kind of a joke only have done two tho. First one was okay I get how a party member could find it disagreeable that you force a spirit already in pain to speak more to gather more information. But the second decision is "lets bash this orc totem with swords!" says the warrior. "No lets do it with magic" says elf druid. The one you side with increases their commitment to the quest and the one you disagree with looses one point of commitment which shifts your combat bonuses.

Maybe end game total level of commitment to the quest will change the stories ending but for the warrior to have his level of commitment on a quest to save his planet because you decided to bash a totem with magic instead felt silly.

But again I only did two floors and I wasn't really patient with the game, I was getting flash backs to dragon age 2 and at that point I was just out. I still can't believe I played that garbage to completion.

Why you compare this game to shit like DA2?

You have right to express your opinion but lets be reasonable, bro.

Also increase difficulty if you are bored with combat.

 

[Bara]

Only brought up DA2 to explain I probably didn't give the game a fair shake as I just dropped it because it brought up memories of fighting wave spawns in every fight.

Plus some of the fights felt uninspired. The last one I did was that fight on floor two where it was a enemy composition just the aura skele knights and the life drainer specters.

The whole gimmick of that is to rush dps on them, take a chokehold before being surrounded while dancing around pillars (or making them with the knight) to break the life drain while more keep poring out. I finished that encounter but it just wasn't very fun for me.

But as you said yeah I only played it on normal I'll probably try the game again on a harder difficulty some day in the future.

 

[CptMace]

So has anybody here played this thoroughly ? Should I dive in blind and report ?

 

[Kem0sabe]

Good explanation / review of the game.

 

[Brood_Star]

I think this game's good. Playing on hard/epic (switching as I go depending on difficulty encounter). It's a blend of cRPG with tower-defense/rts-like elements, but rpg fans should find enough to like about it. It's not the best game ever--maybe an 8.5/10--but I'd definitely encourage people to play it. I don't see the gripes about the writing, which while amateurish at times, is fairly solid and better than a lot of drivel that gets passed around these days.

On the alignment system: it's literally +1 and -1 every choice you make. You're just choosing what to give bonuses to.

 

[CptMace]

Game is legit. Today's update fixed the shit performance.
Combat is fun but I got the feeling it'll get repetitive at some point. Got 3 guys now out of 7, and out of 4 possible at the same time, and the action is already quite satisfying.
I really like the care they put in the flavour text here and there. Before any battle, there's a couple of lines to contextualise the encounter, sometimes giving a hint on how the fight might turn.

 

[fantadomat]

Today i wasted an hour cleaning my pc and decided to try out the game. It is pretty good,now i am at mid floor 3,the story is interesting and competently written,exploration is great it reminds me of king's bounty. The biggest problem is the combat,it could get pretty boring fast,people and creatures move far too slow and there is far too many waves of enemy. Even if you know that you have the battle,the game decides to throw even more week enemy at you. I have ended up playing on easy and story difficulty so i could finish battles faster. Another thing that slightly annoys me is that you can't buff the companions reputation and most of the times they whine about stupid things.
As a whole the game is great and i am having fun playing it.

 

[Saark]

Been having a lot of fun with the game so far. Currently in the 4th level, got 6 characters to choose from and I'm starting to be able to actually build the characters the way I want. Subsequently the game has gotten a lot easier, so I'll switch to Epic to see if it ups the challenge enough so I can't just afk at the beginning of every combat, which is what I am now able to do on hard after gearing/skilling my characters properly.

Balancing is decent, though a few skills/enchants are way too good, which is to be expected with how many choices you have. My biggest damage dealer is my tank who moves like a snail with 2 movespeed but has fairly high armour, and just charges into a stack of enemies to afk there and kill everything with his thorns aura. That shit is broken. Seems like every character can be build to be more of a auto-attack character that you just switch to when you want specific spells, but almost all of them also have abilities with very low cooldowns that can be spammed in a tight situation or when you need to focus something down quickly. I think the game could've needed a few more attributes and more points to distribute between them, feels weird to have attackspeed and skill-cooldown reduction on the same attribute.

 

[fantadomat]

Been having a lot of fun with the game so far. Currently in the 4th level, got 6 characters to choose from and I'm starting to be able to actually build the characters the way I want. Subsequently the game has gotten a lot easier, so I'll switch to Epic to see if it ups the challenge enough so I can't just afk at the beginning of every combat, which is what I am now able to do on hard after gearing/skilling my characters properly.

Balancing is decent, though a few skills/enchants are way too good, which is to be expected with how many choices you have. My biggest damage dealer is my tank who moves like a snail with 2 movespeed but has fairly high armour, and just charges into a stack of enemies to afk there and kill everything with his thorns aura. That shit is broken. Seems like every character can be build to be more of a auto-attack character that you just switch to when you want specific spells, but almost all of them also have abilities with very low cooldowns that can be spammed in a tight situation or when you need to focus something down quickly. I think the game could've needed a few more attributes and more points to distribute between them, feels weird to have attackspeed and skill-cooldown reduction on the same attribute.

The level boss is pretty though if you fight him without the elemental lasers,just click at him .

 

[thesheeep]

Just don't play the game on normal. Hard is very much required to get a challenge every now and then.
Not sure about the hardest difficulty. I never play those as they tend to be over-the-top.

RTwP is less of a problem here, as the combat is relatively slow. You have enough time to do correct positioning and think of tactics - and if you put the game on hard, you even have (on harder encounters) a reason to do so.
I also like how you can create nice party synergies. Clearly some character/skill combos in a party are more efficient and like that the game lets you figure those out freely.

Having no XP progression is odd as hell, but that just means that the gold becomes your "XP" and you decide how to spend it on the characters.
I just hope that there won't be phases in which you HAVE to play with a character that you never used and that is therefore woefully underleveled.

All in all, I would say this really is a little gem.
On normal, this is very much recommended to suggest to people as their "my first tactics/RPG/strategy game". It has all the elements, but is slow and easy enough for a total noob to learn the ropes with.
And on harder difficulties, even more experienced players can have some challenge.

 

[fantadomat]

Guys,don't forget to play the challenges. They are a nice source of items and money for levelling. They are at the tower,on the left side you get the level choosing and on top you can change it to challenges. The biggest problem for me is that combats are far too long and there are a lot of pointless waves. If you are battlefags you may enjoy them more. Still the rest is worth slugging it trough the combat. Great story and really good exploration. I ma surprised that this thread is not very active on the codex. It seems that we have a lot of edgy popamole rpg fans this days.

Oh if you get stuck at level four essence collecting quest:

Spoiler

The earth and water essences are on level three,the water and earth spirits .

 

[Saark]

The level boss is pretty though if you fight him without the elemental lasers,just click at him .

Yeah, that dude had 90% allres and 30k health on Epic, and hit for like 200 Void-Damage every 2 seconds. Was a tough one, but doable. Whisper provides 50% elemental resistance reduction at level 10, and you can easily get like 30-40% magic pen on her too, and just spam the living shit out of any boss with her elemental barrage. Meanwhile Kane does like 100 damage per second just by standing close to the boss with thorns aura, just needed to keep him alive somehow. Switched in Rakhem for Boron since he has much better self-healing, and alternated tanking if Kane ever got too low on health with no healing totem/treant to get aggro off of him. Was a really fun fight, took me like 9 or 10 attempts until I got the strategy right. Level 5 here I come!

 

[thesheeep]

I feel kinda stupid, but... how the hell do you rotate the camera? Is it possible at all? I see nothing about it in the options.
Sometimes, you just can't see shit and I have stumbled into enemies more than once by sheer accident - not that you wouldn't want to fight them anyway, but still.

The map and camera angle not being the same is also confusing as hell.

 

[fantadomat]

I feel kinda stupid, but... how the hell do you rotate the camera? Is it possible at all? I see nothing about it in the options.
Sometimes, you just can't see shit and I have stumbled into enemies more than once by sheer accident - not that you wouldn't want to fight them anyway, but still.

The map and camera angle not being the same is also confusing as hell.

Yeah,the camera is shit. You can't rotate it from what i gathered.

 

[thesheeep]

I feel kinda stupid, but... how the hell do you rotate the camera? Is it possible at all? I see nothing about it in the options.
Sometimes, you just can't see shit and I have stumbled into enemies more than once by sheer accident - not that you wouldn't want to fight them anyway, but still.

The map and camera angle not being the same is also confusing as hell.

Yeah,the camera is shit. You can't rotate it from what i gathered.

Which is really weird as the camera does turn on its own sometimes, like when you enter an area, or after a cutscene, it has a different rotation... Strange oversight.

 

[CptMace]

I suspect they didn't want to go through the bother of designing backgrounds from every perspective.
Additionally, I suspect the same for battle mode, with a blank, empty space where the camera stands, which would be supposedly why you can't rotate it.

In a word : it's a matter of economy of means.

 

[fantadomat]

Just finished level 7 and it was total shit in my eyes. Why put a bunch of level finish stats when half of them get locked because of some stupid random shit. Be warned and make a solid save before beginning the Deva's idiotic test. Also there is quite a few unbalanced fights there. By this point the story have lost its directive,it is a mishmash of ideas,really sad. It is clear that the dev is big star trek fan.

 

[Saark]

Yeah, level 7 was a huge disappointment. Lack of teleporters in certain parts of the area made for some really bad backtracking, and I never liked games locking you into characters after giving you freedom of choice for the majority of the game.
The start of level 8 seemed a lot more like earlier levels, so I'm hoping things pick up again. I also seem to have missed a few chests/enchants in level 6 and 7, though I cannot for the life of me figure out where they might be.

I do like the choices the game gives you in certain situations, I wonder whether these actually affect more than just the alignment with each character. Poor mech in level 5.

One thing that is really starting to bother me is that while you can choose between 7 different characters, only one of them actually provides a meaningful way to heal the entire group, which is desperately needed on higher difficulties. On hard you can get by with a bunch of health-regen and crowdcontrolling mobs, but that's just not feasible on epic anymore because enemies not only have vastly more HP but also quite a lot more armour/resistances. You simply cannot cc them all, and only Aeric can provide the required healing once everyone starts taking damage. Or maybe Kane just isn't a good enough tank since he cannot grab aggro from ranged/casters at all, I may have to switch to the dwarf for that and health-regen/leech may be enough again.

 

[fantadomat]

Yeah, level 7 was a huge disappointment. Lack of teleporters in certain parts of the area made for some really bad backtracking, and I never liked games locking you into characters after giving you freedom of choice for the majority of the game.
The start of level 8 seemed a lot more like earlier levels, so I'm hoping things pick up again. I also seem to have missed a few chests/enchants in level 6 and 7, though I cannot for the life of me figure out where they might be.

I do like the choices the game gives you in certain situations, I wonder whether these actually affect more than just the alignment with each character. Poor mech in level 5.

One thing that is really starting to bother me is that while you can choose between 7 different characters, only one of them actually provides a meaningful way to heal the entire group, which is desperately needed on higher difficulties. On hard you can get by with a bunch of health-regen and crowdcontrolling mobs, but that's just not feasible on epic anymore because enemies not only have vastly more HP but also quite a lot more armour/resistances. You simply cannot cc them all, and only Aeric can provide the required healing once everyone starts taking damage. Or maybe Kane just isn't a good enough tank since he cannot grab aggro from ranged/casters at all, I may have to switch to the dwarf for that and health-regen/leech may be enough again.

Kane does have a party heal,but i never tried it out. The dwarf have a self heal,only good use for the flying hammers. I noticed that most of the damage skills are useless,they do far too little damage and cost far too much. Only skill that i use frequently is the fire arrows. Also itemisation is total shit,i get rewarded with some cool weapon only to find that it have some idiotic negative like negative life steal or -5 movement . This game have some really bad dev decisions. Anyway the first 4 levels were great,the next two level felt really bland and felt out of place,the 7th level is total shit. I am really annoyed at how i got locked out of the alien level because one of my heroes was supposedly out if synch,even if he was in synch.

 

[thesheeep]

I must say, 10+ hours in, the first impression of the game has gotten a lot worse.

The difficulty in this game is all over the place.
I'm constantly switching difficulties between Hard (mostly), Epic (sometimes) and Normal (rarely). Almost per fight
And it is not even when going to a new level when everything suddenly turns extremely hard.

One fight is a walk in the park, while the next one is utterly impossible without completely changing equipment, skills and party members. And then it goes back to walk in the park - for the boss fight!
I just hate design like that. It feels less like a game where I can play with the strategy and party composition I'm most comfortable with and more like a puzzle that has a very limited number of solutions.
And the min-maxing is ridiculous. Forget about ever putting a single point in anything except health/defense for your tank, anything except mastery/might for your DPS, etc.
At least respeccing is made easy - but I would prefer respeccing being impossible while allowing more strategies being viable throughout the game.

Meanwhile, some of your guys are underleveled while others are many levels above them as there simply isn't enough gold to level all of them - and no way to grind gold, either.
Really thinking about Cheat Engining myself unlimited gold so that I can be done with it.

I also agree with fantadomat that the itemization is garbage. A bit like it is in D:OS2. Totally random. Items can range from "I'll keep this forever" to "total garbage". That includes unique items.

 

[fantadomat]

I must say, 10+ hours in, the first impression of the game has gotten a lot worse.

The difficulty in this game is all over the place.
I'm constantly switching difficulties between Hard (mostly), Epic (sometimes) and Normal (rarely). Almost per fight
And it is not even when going to a new level when everything suddenly turns extremely hard.

One fight is a walk in the park, while the next one is utterly impossible without completely changing equipment, skills and party members. And then it goes back to walk in the park - for the boss fight!
I just hate design like that. It feels less like a game where I can play with the strategy and party composition I'm most comfortable with and more like a puzzle that has a very limited number of solutions.
And the min-maxing is ridiculous. Forget about ever putting a single point in anything except health/defense for your tank, anything except mastery/might for your DPS, etc.
At least respeccing is made easy - but I would prefer respeccing being impossible while allowing more strategies being viable throughout the game.

Meanwhile, some of your guys are underleveled while others are many levels above them as there simply isn't enough gold to level all of them - and no way to grind gold, either.
Really thinking about Cheat Engining myself unlimited gold so that I can be done with it.

I also agree with fantadomat that the itemization is garbage. A bit like it is in D:OS2. Totally random. Items can range from "I'll keep this forever" to "total garbage". That includes unique items.

For gold,do the challenges mate,they do give you quite a lot of money.

 

[Iskramor]

was watching gameplay video and this game looks and seems to play just like a Tower Defense game. ugh.

And you cant pause just slow down

 

[fantadomat]

was watching gameplay video and this game looks and seems to play just like a Tower Defense game. ugh.

And you cant pause just slow down

There is an option to change it pause or slow down. It is in the settings menu.