Tower of Time

No. I have been playing with the hope the game gets better later on: As the characters level up, the items get more powerful, new spells, abilities and companions show up, thinking that surely I am only at the start and the game will get better as I progress... No, it doesn't. Every step of progression is dull, boring and underwhelming. Your characters don't level up with exp, they don't get any exp from fights. You search for building upgrades that raise your max level cap and gather gold to promote them to the next level. Every blueprint I think only raises the level cap for two levels. The stat leveling has no depth, every attribut (Might) raises a single attribute, (Damage) and after reaching a 10 point milestone putting more points in it gives one additional stat point (Armor Penetration) with points invested afterwards. Half the time you don't even know how obscure stats like Mastery affect your spell with bonus (extra healing per second on healing spell aura, extra arrows on arrow volley but how many?) until you lock in, and even then the difference is miniscule and underwhelming. Every ability/spell has two branches but you can't mix them up and the game re-inspecs your abilities when you want to try branching out. Your fire arrow ability can either do explosion damage and turn into aoe or have bonus critical chance, not both, the next level up branch adds something like 0.5 splash radius or 3% crit chance respectively. The loot is underwhelming, I check my inventory after picking up 4 or 5 pieces because everything sucks, 7 hours in the game the first dungeon clear reward is better than all the drops of the 10 bosses I have slayed ever since. The legendary drops have green starter item stats or are slightly weaker than the blue rarity items at best. There is no item sauce, no descriptions for lore to get you immersed. Your party is there to fill in the time with bickering dialogues and illogical choices: Do you want to let your idiot companion offer his blood to an undead deity without knowing what will happen to him? -Yes: (Outcome+ the idiot is happy because you let him do his thing +Idiot relationship. The logical companion is unhappy because the idiot put them in danger -1 Normal person relationship. -No (Outcome, + Normal person, - Idiot. -Let them decide (Outcome, + - relationship depending on the outcome. You support a companion's bad ideas, you build up affection with them to get a party bonus like +3 damage or 3 armor or 0.1 mana regeneration and the bonus is lost when they dislike you. Come companions have better bonuses than 0.1 mana regen. Will you support them for the bonus or sacrifice the story choices for minimum profit? Your choice. In leveling up the spell explanation is minimal and the UI confusing as it fuses the reinforcements of abilities, so the tab says this will give your spell 15% critical chance, but the game means 12% base +3% from this upgrade 15% crit chance, your power up fora ccumulating all those level up points is a measly +3% stat. Also there is no text dialogue in combat so you can survey your damage from all sources, you have no idea if your abilities and auras are stacking. Do you do 15 physical +2Earth companion aura +10 fire ability + 5air damage from your side weapon per hit? Do you get all those sources of damage with projectile fast bow firing abilities that add air damage? Your only chance of understanding is trying to catch the flying colorful numbers in a milisecond as the attack lands and count how may different color numbers landed and what number was each one. Same with other boosts and defensive auras, it is difficult to know if an when your party members are buffed or not, especially with proximity auras... The item forging and enchantment system was interesting at first until I realized I could spend all my resources to triple critical chance from 8% to 24% or use all the upgrade slots to add + 6 damage to it, and then get a better item from an easy chest the next second. Plus there are limitations of forging and enchanting slots scaling with rarity, so your green weapon will have 3 to 4 forging slots to get 4 +2 damage, but no enchantment (8% of damage dealt heals you for example) Your random purple epic on the other hand has 1 forging slot for +2 damage but 1 enchantment slot for 8% of damage dealt heals. Both are anticlimatic, both are just pure underwhelming stats with minimum improvement after hours of no level up and no exp bar searching for building upgrades to get your character to level 4. The game is full of combat encounters, but you get no combat exp and low quality loot that just clatters your inventory, and after a while I put the game on story mode difficulty just to speedrun the combat and explore the levels, but the level feel too wide and also empty, criptic notes, bad loot and building blueprints scattered on a huge level with winding paths as your party members pause and freeze in place to commet about everything they see in mini text cutscenes and argue about progressing. The story: I started skipping the dialogues of the party members arguing over obvious things and bad takes that felt like actors trying to act out their roles in low budget B movies. Yada, yada, very mysterious, should we press on? The world depends on us! Fine but I don't like that. Care, the dungeons will get more dangerous, heroes! Let's press on for world peace... The one thing the game has going for it are the beautiful enviroments and bright color pallete, but the quality goes down the more your zoom to take in the details, and the sceletons look like playmobile sceletons with chuncky c shaped hands and wide blocky ribcages and I feel like some tilting camera control is missing as you can't see the items even when highlighted due to the enviroment being on the way. The game has no free camera scrolling to click at a distant place on the map and move there with the cursor, althoguh there are teleporters scattered around the levels. And the pathfinding is terrible, clicking at a locked door next to a party member has them traversing the entire map to try approaching them from a different angle. How is it possible that Icewind Dale a 1999 game has better camera and pathing than this?! That was my experience with the game. I miss Icewind Dale compared to this "modern" isometric rpg I dared to try. You can put it on easy and play mindlessly if you want, but if that's the case why not play Diablo? The loot is a ton more plentiful, the equipment more interesting and the fights aren't interupted by cutscenes of enemies walking up to you, loading screens putting you into an arena, accepting the fight, then fighting enemies in waves spawning from the corners of the room, to claim a single underwhelming item.