Tower of Time

Tower of Time gathers a party of champions and sends them climbing through a single, mysterious tower where technology and magic have collided with dangerous consequences, fighting through hand-crafted levels using a real-time combat system that can be paused or slowed to a tactical crawl at any moment. Released in April 2018 promising over 50 hours of story-driven content, it built a solid, positive following — 83% Very Positive across 1,393 English reviews — anchored in real praise for its setting, even as a substantial share of the same sample describes the combat built around that setting wearing thin well before the credits roll.

A story reviewers say carries the game

The most consistent praise targets the narrative and world-building directly. One reviewer with 46 hours invested calls it "legitimately one of the best stories I've ever seen in a game. It's absolutely a must play if you are into cRPGs... Forget any criticisms from others about gameplay style or whatnot. This game is about the story." Another, more measured reviewer who ultimately soured on the ending still credits the journey: "Quite enjoyable game, with a lot of story, a lot of conversations between characters. Each level of the tower is different, enough to add the element of exploration." That's real, specific agreement that whatever else the game gets wrong, its central narrative hook lands for a meaningful share of players.

Combat that reviewers say doesn't sustain fifty hours

Set against that praise is an equally detailed, equally common complaint about repetition. One reviewer states it plainly: "I found this game to be very repetitive and boring... The battle system is extremely boring and repetitive, you essentially do the same thing over and over and fight the same horder with different skins over and over. I think the devs knew this so they put a fast forward option there to try and mitigate the b[oredom]." A harsher review goes further, calling the combat and interface "at best, passable for a mobile or tablet auto-battler," while still crediting the game's atmosphere as a genuine success. That specific comparison — competent atmosphere paired with combat several independent reviewers describe as thin relative to the runtime — recurs often enough to treat as an accurate account of the game's core tension.

A late-game design choice that strands underprepared players

The most serious, most specific structural complaint concerns the tower's final stretch. One 33-vote reviewer explains directly: "Later part of the Story locks a few of your Heroes for some time. If you only invested into these and ignored all others you are stuck. No fun at all. Story was really good till then despite the combat becoming a little bit repetitive." A second reviewer independently corroborates the same bottleneck from a different angle, describing being forced into an unwinnable solo fight with an underdeveloped character despite "'ridiculous' amounts of dps" elsewhere in the roster. A third, 28-vote review frames the same design choice in harsher terms: the final level "decides to eliminate half your party so you're forced" to rely on whichever champions happen to be left standing. Three independent, detailed accounts of the same specific late-game mechanic stranding players who didn't spread their investment evenly is strong enough convergence to treat as a real, current design flaw rather than an edge case.

A fix that didn't fully resolve the underlying complaint

Worth checking directly against the record: the developer's own partner-events history shows a September 2025 hotfix explicitly targeting "Keybinds, UI, and Final Battle Fixes," suggesting Event Horizon was aware of complaints about the endgame specifically and made a genuine attempt to address them. That's a meaningful data point in the developer's favor, but reviewer accounts of the same roster-lock problem persist in reviews dated after that fix, suggesting the patch addressed some symptoms of the final-battle frustration without resolving the core structural choice underneath it.

Localization and pacing complaints from a specific, recurring angle

A smaller but consistent thread criticizes the English localization and pacing specifically. One reviewer notes plainly: "the English localization is not good. The tutorials are just popup windows with paragraphs of text," while another separately criticizes being "drowned in so much meaningless dialogue that it completely kills the atmosphere and ruins any sense of mystery." These are distinct from the combat-repetition complaints above, pointing at the game's prose delivery itself rather than its systems, and worth weighing separately by anyone put off by text-heavy RPG tutorials in particular.

What the achievement curve confirms

Global achievement data shows strong opening engagement — 74.2% of players land their first combat kill — followed by a steady taper through mid-game milestones in the 35-45% range, before falling into the low single digits for the hardest late-game "Epic" difficulty content. That pattern lines up closely with reviewer accounts of a game that hooks players early through its story and setting, holds a meaningful chunk of them through the mid-game despite growing repetition, and loses the rest before they reach its most demanding content.

Verdict

Tower of Time's story and setting are genuinely strong enough to carry a real share of its audience through a 50-hour runtime, and Event Horizon's continued support across nearly eight years — including a fix aimed directly at endgame complaints — shows real, ongoing investment in the game. Its combat repetition and a specific, well-documented late-game roster-lock issue are serious enough flaws to weigh heavily against that story, particularly for players who don't deliberately spread progression across their full party. Worth its budget price for RPG fans who prioritize narrative over combat variety, with the specific advice to build out every champion rather than a handful of favorites.

Sources: Steam store page and appdetails API (release date, pricing, platform data); Steam's aggregate review data (query_summary totals, English-language sample); individually read user reviews, both positive and negative, sorted by helpfulness and recency; Steam's global achievement statistics API; Event Horizon's own partner-events patch history from 2018 through 2026.