Game Review - Tower of Fantasy

Game Review: Tower of Fantasy by Level Infinite / Perfect World Entertainment / Hotta Studio

Score: +5/-10

(Review updated 2023-Jan-30)

An impressive effort for a quickly crushed out game that tries to feel like Genshin Impact in many ways. Fairly smooth launch despite login issues right on the big day. A few days after the official launch date, I downloaded and ran it with no issues, no queue, and it ran smoothly on my three-year old desktop at maximum graphics settings with only a few subtitle / voiceover bugs as far as I could tell.

In Tower of Fantasy, dwindling resources and a lack of energy have forced mankind to leave earth and migrate to Aida, a lush and habitable alien world. There, they observed the comet Mara and discovered an unknown but powerful energy called "Omnium" contained in it. They built the Omnium Tower to capture Mara, but due to the influence of Omnium radiation, a catastrophic disaster occurred on their new homeworld.

+1 Beautiful anime artwork.

+1 Excellent character generation. But obviously your character will be an anime toon.

• Strangely, their system of "simulacrums" encourages you to collect characters to completely replace your look. But I suppose eventually people can get bored of their own toon.

Weak story

• -1 There's not quite enough to establish just why you are following the story. You are probably supposed to have emotionally bonded with the early NPC you meet, Shirli, so that you care what happens to her enough to keep moving forward, except it's really just not that interesting, not made urgent, not made to feel important.
• The story prologue is basically a long sequence of tutorials to various systems. Which is fine and typical, except the story is quite weak and in many ways a bunch of cliches.
• Probably the worst part happens when you get to the city in the clouds because they resolve an incident with a huge deux ex machina.
• This is sort-of necessary to establish the technology that is featured later in the ending of the story arc, but it's really heavy-handed. If they are willing to use it for something minor, why don't they do it more often and fix everything? It's sort of lazy and weakens the story.
• -1 Overall, the story events are a mishmash of anime tropes which weaken a story that already doesn't really hook you strongly.
• Anime tropes on their own aren't a dealbreaker, except when used in a haphazard way. In Tower of Fantasy, they felt like randomly selected events to fill in quest steps. E.g., "To fix this gizmo we need another gizmo. Oh, luckily there's one being offered as a tournament prize!" (In a barely populated backwater arena -- why would this have a fabulous prize?)
• I felt more interested in exploring the world but they had me yo-yoing back and forth between the same landmarks over and over for the initial main quest.
• -1 There's also very little story. You get a little bit of a few scenes, then the next Chapter in the story starts -- except you have to wait several hours for it to unlock.

-1 Really dumb tutorial popups.

• When you come across something new, or if there's a mechanic they want to teach you, you can press a key to get a pop-up window. This is fine except for a couple of things.
• The main issue is it's not easily clear how to access that information later. This is particularly bad because...
• Often they want to give you combat information (e.g., about boss mechanics). Except they do so in the middle of combat -- and they didn't pause combat. So you can read the tutorial while getting the snot kicked out of you, or you can skip it try try to find it later. Only you can't find it later.

Boring combat

• -1 Mostly you just mash your attack key as fast as you can.
• To be fair though, you can do more than just mash the attack button: You can...
• Swap weapons at the appropriate time for a special attack
• You can use your one skill off cooldown.
• You can try to master Dodge to get a time-stop effect by "perfectly dodging".
• But it definitely feels boring when most of the time you are just clicking the attack button as fast as possible. Plus it's likely to wear out your mouse button in short order.
• -1 The element type of your weapon is supposed to be important but it feels much more important outside of combat when you have to interact with certain objects.
• +1 That said, the animations and skills do look fun and powerful, and the combat action is smooth.
• +1 There are a couple of interesting mechanics:
• "Perfect  dodging" to make a time-stop field that is probably everyone's most powerful ability.
• Staying in mid-air while you continue to attack (e.g., with your bow) is also quite interesting... but in the end you are still just mashing the attack button while in mid-air until your endurance runs out.

-1 Immediately sent to the cash shop

• You start with three weapons: Physical damage, electrical damage, and fire damage. And that's it. You want to play with other types? Go roll your gacha and hope for something nice.
• Fortunately throughout the tutorial you don't actually need anything other than your basic weapons. How long this situation will be valid remains to be seen.
• You do earn a lot of gacha rolls just from exploring, but the random nature means no matter how many you earn or buy, you might never get anything useful or that you like.
• Want to play a healer or tank? Good luck because you need to pull a random weapon for that role.
• Extremes in roll results can happen. For example, for SR weapons over the course of a few hundred rolls we got enough to max-star one awkward weapon (The Terminator) that we weren't even really using, and barely any other types.
• SSR weapons are supposed to be good but you might get one that handles awkwardly for your playstyle or most situations and that's basically a waste.

-1 Boring crafting - Automatic cooking

• Lots of food types of collect for crafting. It's certainly no scarce, and that's important as the primary way to recover your health.
• But other than this there's no sign of crafting anything. And there's nothing to suggest it'll get any more interesting than basically making out-of-combat health regeneration and instant-health-with-cooldown consumables.
• At least entice us to continue by showing us something more exciting is coming with crafting. If there's anything at all. Could very well be they rushed this game out the door to get it in the market and will maybe update it with nice features later. Here's hoping.

-1 Levelling is useless because everything is scaled

• When you level up, so do the enemies. You never ever really "get better".
• So in fact levelling is not a promotion but a DEmotion because your gear doesn't level up to match. That's what you really need to level, except your character level keeps getting pushed up by every little thing giving you XP, such as finding loot boxes in the wilderness and opening them only to discover a few junk materials.

+1 If you don't want to play the game, you can play the minigames.

• There are quite a lot of minigames / training instances and lots of variety: Jumping games, combat challenges, even a mini score-the-goal soccer (!). So you can certainly take a detour to do them.
• Actually, you really do need to do them regularly to get the special currency to buy stuff to upgrade your character.
• Although, what's the point of even playing the game if you're only there for the minigames?
• -1 There are too many minigames, all offering materials relevant to the game somehow.
• This might be good for late-game players who've run out of exploration and are waiting for more story, but for newcomers it just feels overwhelming and confusing.
• You could try to take your time and do what you like, but that also means giving up progress on the various activity tracks like the weekly activity progress which has you doing a mix of activities. So there is actually very strong pressure by design to log in every day and do everything.

2022-Aug-15 evaluation:

With such a weak start after several hours of play, I just gave up. It's early days and Tower of Fantasy is at the moment a really beautiful dud. Hopefully promising mechanics updates will come each quarter.

Overall, Tower of Fantasy is like another New World -- All gloss but no substance. Except the visuals, everything else is not just lacklustre but inferior to games produced even 10 to 20 years ago that have better story, more engaging combat, more sensible mechanics.

2023-Jan-31 evaluation:

Tower of Fantasy has an astonishing amount of content and expansions added in a short time (compared to a lot of western studio games) as well as story updates. The story so far is lacklustre and there actually isn't much. You are just busy distracted by exploration and minigames, probably hoping to get more and more free gacha rolls that ultimately are dissatisfying because it all comes down to luck.

However if you don't care much for the story or setting, you might be happy with the sheer number and types of minigames. If you start feeling overwhelmed trying to do everything, especially if you feel you are scrambling to catch up, better to just stop and play something less cluttered.