Tower Wizard is an incremental game that does not overstay its welcome; with a whole run done in about five hours, it’s quite the unusual twist on the whole “level up multiple systems to progress further every run” genre, and I had a good time with it! The cool pixel art style really made it stand out, too.
The core of the game is fairly simple; You have a tower that you must build by spending different resources. You start with an orb that gives you magic when you click it, then it grows your tower and you can build a Study where spirits can be summoned to automatically give you magic over time, and the study produces Knowledge that can be used to purchase boosts. Then you get a small forest with druids building totems to give you boosts. You must use Spirits in all the structures (they are like your workers) so you must choose where to allocate them.
After this step, you unlock the option to Prestige, resetting your tower and giving you powerful blessings to make your next runs easier. This is the only part where I’ve felt like I was seeing too much behind the game design loop, the prestige bar fills at a known rate (you know when your next point will be) and you can see how many points you need to purchase the next tiers of blessings, so I just reset my game when I had enough to get the new tier, and this worked very well.
After that, you get to build various structures using knowledge from your Study, like an Academy where you research upgrades, a Dragon’s Nest where you raise a dragon (to unlock upgrades), an alchemy lab (where alchemists create gold that you use to create relics that boost your other systems), and an embassy (where Diplomats produce trade agreements that you spend on nations to give yourself upgrades (this system has an end when you have all the upgrades, which is kinda silly)).
The next step of the game is needing to destroy ‘walls’ that are placed in the sky to prevent you from building your tower even more, which you do by hiring creatures that damage it. Runecraft also unlocks after a while, which allows you to allocate Spirits as Runesmiths to create runes that you spend on an upgrade tree. After that, you destroy all the walls by figuring out the most optimal methods, and you win the game!
It’s a very strange feeling because I feel like Tower Wizards could have taken ten times as much to beat if the developer had wanted to. Tweaking the balance of the numbers just a little, making prestiges give a lot less oomph, make the timers a little longer, or had a few extra steps between everything, but they didn’t. Does this make a better game? Well, it certainly makes for an incremental game that I have completed and I didn’t feel like I needed to play every hour of my waking life in order to be optimal at, so that’s clearly a plus!
If you enjoy incremental games, and want something bite-sized that you can properly enjoy and go through without needing a wiki, a calculator and eight thousand hours ahead of you, Tower Wizard is pretty great. Well worth the price of admission!
