Towers of Scale

Are you looking at this wondering if this game has the same juice as Tactical Nexus? The answer is yes. Even now, in early access.

I am not a magic tower game player, I put around 10 hours into tactical nexus and bounced off it due to the difficulty. The simplicity of this game's basic mechanics has made it so much easier to reason about - I feel like I'm actually able to make a large scale plan about how I'm going to tackle a level, which is immensely satisfying when it works out. The overall tower design is also incredible so far (I've beaten the first 5 towers), every room has a unique setup, often built around a theme of a certain kind of trade-off, which helps reduce the amount you have to think about as a player whilst still having these huge sprawling levels. I'm excited to see how much more is happening in these towers when you have more gems to play around with (: Overall, great experience so far, check it out if you were scared off by some of the other entries in the genre but find the idea of solving giant puzzles cool.

Played the demo (way too much) and loved it. So far, the full game is just tons more content with the same great puzzle experience. Each tower has you making minor adjustments to maximize your score, and then revisiting the tower later with more meta-progression and trying completely new routes to save keys, power, or reach new areas.

If you don't know what a magic tower is just go play the demo. If you get 6 crowns buy the game. This is the first real attempt at making something like Tactical Nexus that's actually playable by humans. Not that TN isn't great, but this is a game where one person or two friends hanging out on VC can actually do quite well. Personally that's exactly what I was looking for. It isn't going to give you many thousand hours of gameplay like TN, but there's probably 100 hours here on release and more to come. Progression is very compelling.

This is a great 'magic tower' style game, and the more constrained and (initially) straightforward ruleset makes it very easy to approach. I've bounced off some other games in this genre before, with the only other I've sunk hours into being Tactical Nexus, and this has certainly captured me in the same way, for the same reason - there is a layer of meta-progression that makes each tower more than just a single static puzzle. The meta-progression is not the kind that makes the game 'easier' in the same sense of, say, roguelikes. Instead, it gives you additional resources that allow for entire strategy changes, and it results in a sort-of self-balancing metaprogression that I find deeply fascinating (and, if my 2.5k hours in Tactical Nexus are anything to go by, deeply addicting). It adds a replayability to the game beyond simply chasing optimization on an unchanging puzzle. I've played all but one of the towers so far and each feels very unique. The first chapter's towers are all fairly bite-sized but build up the game's core mechanics, while the second chapter introduces a new axis to the puzzles entirely. I'm very excited to see what gets added next!

Great addition to the magic tower genre, even in this early stage. The main difference from Tactical Nexus et al is that, instead of the usual ATK, DEF, HP and levelups, this game uses a single stat named "Power" that gates most things and also acts as score. On the surface it seems like a game about essentially making a single number go up would be shallow, but the dev manages to wring lots of depth out of this simple core mechanic, with each tower adding some new bells and whistles to keep things fresh. Puzzle design is strong and gets challenging by the time you reach tower 6, but it's overall a bit more forgiving than Tactical Nexus, with fewer red herrings and trap choices, making this a potential good intro for someone new to the genre.

A very satisfying ultra-minimal ruleset in the vein of Tower of the Sorcerer. As someone who really likes Tactical Nexus and DROD RPG 2, but who is also a novice player and gets overwhelmed by the difficulty and size of those games, I really appreciate the approachability and minimality of Towers of Scale, it's perfect for me! The towers are well-designed so far, and it seems there's a lot of depth and meta-progression to uncover for hardcore players too.

Wonderful game! This is going to be my #1 recommendation for people interested in the magic tower genre. I love Tactical Nexus, but this game does many of the things that make TN tick while being a lot less intimidating. The way the mechanics have been streamlined to a single stat while keeping the optimisation problem interesting is genius, the towers are shorter, so you can usually do them in one sitting, and I find the graphical style much more readable. The towers are really well designed to give each one its own identity, both in terms of additional mechanics and structure. And there's already a lot of game here: at 20 hours, I've "beaten" all but one tower in the initial release (2 chapters + 3 bonus towers), but I have only just started engaging with the metaprogression, which makes you revisit the towers with completely new considerations (not just to optimise them better than before, but also to unlock and beat additional, previously inaccessible parts of each tower).

Fun optimization problem in the shape of a dungeon crawler. Play the demo first - if you find the demo too easy, you might still enjoy the game, but if you find the demo too hard then you're probably better off finding something else, because the other towers are more complex, challenging and fun. (At least if you like "more complex and challenging".) The demo is also a very complete demo - it's got six of the easiest towers from the game to play with, so you'll have a lot of time to figure out if this game is your cup of tea. The play general flow - at least when spoiler-free - of "climb the tower, get to an end point, then later rerun the tower better with the intel in advance" remains the basic gameplay dynamic across runs. Then, after running other towers, rerun it again with metaprogression that allows you to open up gem gates for routing options or additional starting resources. At the current price, I have already gotten my money's worth from the demo alone, and have not beaten every currently released tower (a total of 15, 12 standard stages and 3 EX stages with very limited metaprogression) at the time of this review.

Play the demo first. I purchased without hesitation. This is a good magic tower game.