Tower of Time [Steam], the party-based RPG with a rather interesting real-time tactical battle system has recently left Early Access and it’s great.

Tower of Time offers up quite an interesting story, one that captured my interest right away. The way it's told, through some beatiful cinematics is pretty clever too. They look like paintings splashing across your screen—awesome style! The world is shrouded in darkness and civilization is on the brink of collapse after some unknown cataclysm. An insanely large and ancient tower was somehow lifted up and out of the ground, turned upside down and slammed far into the planet. I instantly thought that I must find out how and more importantly—why.

For those who’ve played party-based RPGs, you will instantly feel at home. That is, until you end up in combat. Tower of Time isn’t just a good-looking game, it’s also somewhat unique with the combat system. Truthfully, a system I wasn’t initially sold on, but the more time I put into it the more I grew to love it. I've had my butt kicked quite a few times, as it does take getting used to.

Combat is done in real time, with an option to pause or slow time. Combat also isn’t done directly in the area you’re exploring, instead it moves you into a special screen like you might expect to see in a JRPG. What’s interesting, is that your choices and tactics actually truly matter in the battles. Positioning your party correctly, making wise use of their skills and so on. During the combat, each character generates a threat level. So enemies will attack targets with the highest threat, which gives you some interesting choices to make in how you approach your targets.

The skill system is rather clever too, with you being able to draw on the screen to make a wall for example, so you could block enemy paths or completely stop a single larger enemy while you deal with the others.

There’s 7 unique character classes, a reasonably complex skill system complete with special enhancement trees and plenty of options. Around 150 different types of enemies to encounter, boss enemies, difficulty levels to suit people of all skills, hand-crafted levels to explore and loot and much more.

It feels like a game made by a much bigger studio in all honesty, I’ve been very surprised by it. Interesting combat, a good story, beautiful presentation and the Linux version works pretty well. Performance on the higher settings is a little mediocre, but it's been as solid as a rock with no crashes at all for me.

It’s absolutely worth a look, so do check out Tower of Time on Steam.