Mystic Towers

The Good
Just when you think you have a company figured out, they go and publish a game like this. Mystic Towers was coded by independent Australian developer Lindsay Whipp, and was then picked up by Apogee. It was the only game Whipp ever made for the PC, and is weird and compelling at the same time.

Really, I'm amazed kid-friendly Apogee wanted to have anything to do with Mystic Towers. Not only does it contain nudity and off-color humor (although only in the two final episodes, the shareware is squeaky clean) but also its gameplay is derived from two of the most mismatched genres imaginable. Trying to market this game must have been a living hell.

It's kind of hard to describe Mystic Towers. There are two ways you can treat it. A very lightweight, arcadey RPG, or a standard arcade game that incorporates a few RPG tropes. I don't mean it's a Diablo-style action RPG if that's what you're thinking. Mystic Towers is heavily derived from hardcore pen and paper RPG games, and combines thinking puzzles and exploration-based game progression with jump-and-run button mashing. There are also elements of the adventure and puzzle game genres present, making the game weird and very eclectic.

You play as a wizard who obsessively scratches his crotch. You must enter a series of towers, destroy all the monsters, destroy the monster generator that is spawning the monsters, and find the large red tower key that allows you to leave. You have lots of abilities at your disposal. Your wizard can drag boxes around to make a stack and reach high-up places, use powerups to fly or become invisible, and collect coins with which he can buy weapons. You can also pick up spells that, although powerful, have a strict usage limit. At times the game plays like an isometric version of Paganitzu, and at other times more like a straight RPG in regard to how big a role exploration plays. Make no mistake, to play this game you need a map.

Fighting monsters is the simplest part of Mystic Towers, if not the easiest. You equip spells and fire them off as fast as possible, while the monster fights back with whatever weapon he has. Rather than throwing hordes of weak creatures your way Mystic Towers instead spaces several strong monsters out so you only can fight one at a time. Each monster is a powerful opponent and you should carefully prepare for each battle before engaging. Monsters will give chase if they smell you, and the game becomes really tense when you're low on health and spells and the "Monster is nearby" icon flashes red.

Graphics are very impressive, with great use of an isometric perspective that gives Mystic Towers a pseudo-3D look. Sprites in Mystic Towers are drawn so they actually look like they have depth and exist in real space. There's lots of environmental interaction possible, such as pushing a statue backwards to uncover gold underneath, and flipping light switches to illuminate whole rooms. Artistically a lot of emphasis has been put into designing the towers themselves, which are replete with enough disturbing decor to stock the Grimoire Morgue. And did I mention there's female nudity in this game? Yeah, there are statues and paintings of nudes throughout the later levels that leave little to the imagination and this makes the Mystic Towers one of the few cases where you'll see adult content in one of Apogee's pre-Duke Nukem 3D games.

The Bad
This game would have been better as a straight action game. It would have been better as a straight RPG too. The game never figures out what it wants to be and as often as not the two sides clash.

Want examples? For one thing there's a huge over-emphasis on exploring and item collecting and the player is forced to go around and around in ever increasing circles. To unlock a door on floor 3 you might need a key on floor 2 that is protected by a force field deactivated by a switch on floor 5 which is guarded by a monster you need a special weapon to beat that is on floor 1...you get the idea. Despite its potential the game boils down to a long series of item hunts.

In contrast to the ultra technical nature of the level design, combat is ludicrously simple. There is no strategy or method to it whatsoever, you simply blaze away as fast as you can hit the Ctrl button and pray you were able to collect enough spells. This might not be so bad but there's no way to tell how much max HP a monster has. Your spells are either good enough or not good enough, and there's no way to tell.

The controls are annoyingly bad for this sort of game. I understand isometric games are difficult to design keyboard control schemes for but Mystic Towers is a particularly awful case. Your wizard can and move and attack in only four directions and a lot of time is spent trying to line yourself up with enemies, and the game's limited controls seriously cripple what you can do in a fight (it's impossible to walk backwards, for example, or to side strafe). Want to cast a spell while moving? Forget it.

Mystic Towers depends heavily on "whoops, you triggered a trap" level design and this also gets old fast. There are hidden bombs that drop on your head when you least expect it, invisible tiles that poison you, and other annoying things that are nearly impossible to anticipate. There's a reveal spell that points out these hidden dangers, but it isn't commonly found in the game.

There's no dialogue, no character interactions, and the bare bones of a story. And really there isn't much content or depth in Mystic Towers. The graphics for each tower change, but the gameplay remains exactly the same. And although there are technically 30 monsters, they all behave pretty much the same except with different levels of HP. Some of them shoot fireballs and a few fly, but other then that they're identical clones of one another.

The Bottom Line
Playing Mystic Towers is like watching a movie where the director was sacked halfway through production and replaced by someone with completely different ideas. It's a confused and confusing game that has some good ideas but never coalesces into something cohesive. Is it good or bad? It's both at the same time.