Tower of Fantasy promises exciting battles, a captivating open world and unique characters – and looks like a clone of the successful Genshin Impact. We find out how independent the new MMO really is in our preview.
The resounding success of the action role-playing game Genshin Impact has obviously made the industry giant Tencent emphatically aware of untapped potential: Tower of Fantasy, published by Tencent”s own developer team Hotta Studios, not only clearly follows in the same vein visually, but many gameplay elements are also very reminiscent of the competition already released in 2020.
Icons, gacha mechanics and the character variety quickly give the impression of a rather brazen copy. I have therefore taken a closer look at what Tower of Fantasy is really all about in a press preview for you.
Table of Contents
Slide the chest control
My journey in Tower of Fantasy during the preview sent me to the anime-style sci-fi world of Aida, irradiated after a disaster. Humans can only travel there using suppressors, while monsters lurk in abundance, hacking everything hostile to pieces with huge weapons and colourful effects.
So far, so conventional – and anyone who has played Genshin Impact will discover an extremely large amount of familiarity in the world-building and its appearance, apart from the futuristic buildings and clothing.
As with all previous anime-style games, after the first few minutes in the intuitive tutorial in the character editor I failed grandiosely to create a woman who looked at least halfway grown-up. I didn”t really need the two controls for breast size and the distance between the breasts, but I would have preferred to have more choice in hairstyles and clothes!
Then I entered the idyllic, colourful game world, which, apart from Genshin Impact, also reminded me a little of Wildstar (who still knows it?): Wide, comic-like landscape, different weather, day and night changes, wildly thrown together buildings made of junk and very lively flora and fauna.
Action that grabs us
At first I stumbled a bit awkwardly through the first battles and the introduction of the main story. In it, my heroine was picked unconscious out of the wilderness by the people of a small settlement called Astra Shelter and thanked for saving her life – sure! – by simple relief services.
Classic fetch-and-bring missions dominated the first hour of play, but thanks to my slowly accumulating arsenal of weapons, even these tasks became quite fun pretty quickly.
The action-packed combat system not only required active dodging and aiming, but also charged up the special abilities of my three weapons – two for melee, one for ranged – with every blow I threw at my opponents. As soon as I switched to a fully charged other weapon, I ignited a really heavy storm of effects with the next attack, which not only looked good but also did a decent amount of damage. Used correctly, I was able to quickly crack much stronger opponents and gain a lot of experience.
However, I couldn”t observe any combined effects from the different elemental types of my weapons, as they are needed in Genhin Impact to defeat world bosses. In the battles, it depends above all on the correct use of the abilities of each individual weapon at the appropriate time. With the receipt of my first simulacrum – and with it a special weapon – Tower of Fantasy had really hooked me.
Prehistory and Background
In Tower of Fantasy, mankind has exploited the earth to such an extent that the remaining resources, including the lack of energy, are not sufficient for survival – so it was a case of new planet, new luck. Since humanity is not known to learn much from past mistakes, Aida”s inhabitants immediately tried to exploit the comet Mara, where the powerful energy source Omnium was discovered.
The excessive use of Omnium led to a new flowering of civilisation on Aida until a momentous catastrophe in which humans and animals mutated into monsters due to the radiation emitted by the Omnium. In the main conflict of the game world, you fight on the side of the order force Hykros, whose headquarters are located on the space station of the same name above Aida, against the terrorist heirs of Aida.]
Great weapons, lots of freedom of movement
A simulacrum is a type of chip that gives access to a unique weapon as well as optics of fighters specialised with it. Unlike in Genshin Impact, you control only one character at a time instead of a group. With new simulacra, you merely expand your arsenal of weapons with, for example, a giant frost sword, a flame cube, a flame scythe or a circular saw blade.
You can also apply the look of a simulacrum to your avatar as a skin. New simulacra are available during the main story or story missions or as loot from loot boxes. I was also able to upgrade all weapons for more damage with weapon materials and matrices from enemy loot, improved simulacrum weapons get stronger additional effects when upgraded.
For me, a real plus point for Tower of Fantasy became the extreme freedom of movement in the game world. When I suddenly fell through the game world after jumping off a rock during a mission and materialised about a kilometre away from the actual mission objective, it was no problem.
In addition to the movement options known from Gensin Impact, such as running, swimming, climbing and double jumping, Tower of Fantasy also includes a surfboard with which you can glide elegantly over water surfaces, a jetpack for short distances in the air and a stylish sci-fi motorbike.
Along the way, I had relaxed and reached level 20 without any feeling of annoying grind. The mixture of exploring, hacking around enemies, collecting cooking resources, creative puzzles and mini-dungeons was enough to distract me from the actually dull mission design.
Tower of Fantasy and the monetisation
Like almost all Free2Play games, Tower of Fantasy has an in-game shop where you can purchase the premium currency Tanium for real money. For this you get weapon upgrade materials, three different types of Lootboxes (“cores” in the colours black, gold and red), outfits, in-game currency and more.
The Gacha mechanic of Tower of Fantasy applies to the Lootboxes: per core you receive either weapon upgrade material, a standard weapon or a rare or super rare simulacrum. If you haven”t received a super rare simulacrum after opening 80 golden or red quality cores, the system”s mercy mechanic will grant you one. Simulacra obtained twice are converted into upgrade material for their special weapon.
Black and gold cores are obtained without real money as a reward for logging in or events, or are collected by exploring the game world, from plants and completed daily missions, bounties, level tasks and jump puzzles. During our preview and also after the game”s release, there was still no reason to use real money in the shop in view of the large number of black and gold quality cores obtained. Whether the system will remain fair in the long run, however, is something we cannot yet definitively judge after our playtime so far.
Riddle, discover … and wait!
When it comes to puzzling and discovering, Tower of Fantasy is more oriented towards Zelda Breath of the Wild than Genshin Impact: The jetpack and surfboard are considered relics, of which I packed a few more while exploring the three mini-dungeons in the starting zone around the shelter.
A gun with which I can temporarily stick a platform to jump on to floors and walls, mini rockets to blow up obstacles and a cube with which I can push other objects aside. These not only helped in solving the associated puzzles in the respective dungeon, but also in the jumping puzzles in the open game world.
However, Hotta Studios put a hard wall in front of the limitless collecting and story play: Some chests in the game world can only be opened after several days of waiting, and you can only enjoy the main story in bits and pieces at the moment. After about one hour of progress per day, the game ends and you have to wait almost a day to continue.
Since the release on 11 August 2022, the achievable level cap has been raised by two levels every day, so that by the time this article is published, the highest characters should have reached around level 40. The maximum level 70 will be unlocked at the beginning of November at the earliest, as from level 46 the upper limit only increases by one more level per day.
The developer team justifies the decision for such a blatant level lock with the fact that otherwise too many players would only work towards the maximum level and not get to know the rest of the game world including the stories and content contained therein.
The feedback from the community is rather mixed in view of so many time-gating measures. While there are some voices on Reddit who can”t and don”t want to invest much time anyway and are therefore not bothered by the restrictions, other fans expressed concerns that the low level progress would take away their desire to log in and that Tower of Fantasy would remain a side game for them at most.
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Given the level restrictions, it is not yet possible to say how much long-term motivation there is in the rather small game world, including solo and group activities. So far, Tower of Fantasy seems relatively well-rounded, except for minor bugs, and should be worth a look, especially for genre fans and people with little time.
Whether Tencent”s assault on Genshin Impact will succeed also remains to be seen. Although over four million fans registered for the game before its release, Tower of Fantasy currently ranks among the five most-viewed games on Twitch.
However, the example of New World shows that initial enthusiasm is not automatically followed by lasting success. In any case, Genshin Impact has added a lot of content since its release and will publish the next major update on 24 August 2022.
Editor”s verdict
Sometimes, even with over twenty years of MMORPG experience, I still get surprised – Tower of Fantasy really gave me some really fun hours of play. Once I stopped taking my overly huge weapons seriously and just enjoyed the colourful slaughtering, I could wonderfully roam the world, whacking anything unlucky enough to be in my way and trying out what cool effects newly found simulacrum weapons had. The combat system, while movement intensive, is easy to learn and use as it relies on a few buttons combined with mouse clicks – so you don”t have to remember too many combinations.
What surprised me the most, however, were the surprisingly profound, sometimes very dark stories in the actually very colourful and harmless game world. This is also typical for anime genres and, in view of too many fantasy worlds with sugar coating, pleasantly interesting. Now I want to know how the main story continues, how the other weapons play that I haven”t found yet, and what to expect in the group content. Since I can”t spend much time in the game anyway, the current level and story restrictions don”t affect me much. Nevertheless, I find this decision rather dubious, because it takes an enormous amount of momentum out of the initial motivation.
