Epic Tower for Tireless Lovers

Truly, a decidedly Not Recommendable game. The controls and interface are a huge disaster, and that on top of the game design being dated enough to be reminiscent of something from perhaps as far back as the Win 95 era. (The egregious over-emphasis on clunky keyboard controls in situations where mouse controls would be more intuitive is most especially supportive of that impression, as that characteristic started being fluxed out after DOS was de-integrated from later Windows editions. While 95 still reliably had games that utilized controls similarly [though perhaps not quite as significantly] clunky as this game, I recall that by Windows 98 these sort of clunky controls would already have been put under criticism. With that in mind, we can say that this game's design is dated to, by the most generous consideration, Windows 2000. For genre-associable reference, Dungeon Keeper was Win 95 and Dungeon Keeper 2 was Win 98. While I don't recall DK 1 clearly enough, I can say that Dungeon Keeper 2 has *much* better controls than this game.) WASD is completely borked (ex, Q goes left, D goes right, and there's no way to go up at all), making it impossible to use a WASD based movement scheme. Thus, you're running around, super super clunkily using arrow keys and A, obsessively manually micromanaging traps that need to be reset every single time they're used, through a map that really needs ready access to mouse zooming (remember, both hands are busy on the keyboard, and mouse isn't used for anything important to begin with, and the Tab-based keyboard shortcut for zoom is as disastrous as the rest of the keyboard design, what with its random zoom effect). This is all compounded by the extreme joy of the traps being mostly unresponsive to recognizing your attempts to reset them. The base framework seems like it could have been made into a passable game, but none of the design elements- from how you place traps, interact with the map, or interact with your character, to how the levels and enemies are designed and how the art and screen size are presented, make for an accessible game. In short, none of mechanics, polish, or design concepts have any appeal. Ultimately, I pushed myself to finish the tutorial so I could say I gave the game a fair shake (and the tutorial has various polish issues on top of everything, with the low quality of the task and interface presentation ending up being rather reminiscent of playing a low-grade flash puzzle game just to get through), all while looking forward to the moment where I could quit the game entirely. Even after putting in my best efforts to tolerate the game just for the tutorial's duration I still very nearly didn't make it through the tutorial, since it was just that extremely unpleasant. So, to recap: Decent, albeit generic concept, with dated, glitchy, unpolished, and flat-out unfriendly execution. Bizarre thing is, the cutscenes are rather well presented, and even though the art isn't at all presented in a manner that's conducive to good gaming, it's a bit better than your usual trashware art. Despite all this, it's hard to take the game as anything other than trashware, as the developer made absolutely no efforts to make the game accessible to gamers, nor to utilize intuitive or fun gameplay mechanics. In short, it's a whole lot of wasted effort, and I'm not at all sure why the developer did it. There were so many ways to make this work, but ultimately? This feels like a student project made in separate parts and then put together, with minimal design oversight and minimal game development experience (nevermind basic gaming experience from within the past two decades of Windows releases) from all parties involved. And that, ultimately, overshadows any other considerations one may have towards the game.