The Tower
A Review by Jack "NeoSpade" Iball
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Made for the 2011 Fan Game contest, The Tower is Voltire's tribute to the online flash game The Enchanted Cave, which for the sake of this review I actually played to get a clearer idea of what Voltire was inspired by.
The Tower is quite faithful to The Enchanted Cave, while at the same time adding a stronger JRPG element to it.

The Tower is very much so it's own game, that is to say stylistically and the way in which it's presented are very different to the game which it is based off.
From the get go this game gives the player a choice of equipment, Voltire used the new elemental system in this, so everything seems to have an effect on your resists/weaknesses adding something of a tactical element to the game.
Each floor, apart from every 10th has enemies, coins and treasure chests, this format is similar to The Enchanted Cave, it's here that the similarities end really.

This is the format used throughout the game, get used to this.

Voltire hasn't just made a flat out clone of The Enchanted Cave, he's been somewhat intuitive, new setting, characters, enemies and a bit of backstory (not much but still it's something). In addition he's added a few new features of his own some are a nice touch, others are just plain broken.
A nice addition is the added risk factor on opening chests, some of which might remove some of your hard earned (or not, read on) money. Others include Pluto, who asks you simple questions for prizes and the secret passages.

And sadly no, the next questions are not "What is your quest?" and "What is your favourite colour?".

There is also a lottery in this game. The feature is a nice idea, and I like the fact he added something that resembled a mini-game in here. HOWEVER... this is the single most game breaking feature in the game, you can hit the jackpot far too often, and far too easily, in addition to this the save-point is always on the same floor, making it very easy to just quit and reload if you somehow manage to go bust, not that that matters as the game doesn't stop you from playing and winning the lottery even if you lack the necessary funds. These are easily fixed issues. Nothing else is really that broken, but with money being such an important resource in this game it can nerf the balanced combat.

This Witch proves that gambling is always a safe bet (pun intended).

Moving on to combat, which is the meat of the game we see that Voltire has in fact balanced this game very well, the only way to recover in this game is by using potions, which are fairly rare and quite expensive. While at first the enemies seem to be very weak and easy to beat, with them dealing next to no damage, it soon adds up and if you've not saved up and bump into a boss (or stronger enemy) and are fresh out of them, you're going to be in a spot of trouble.
Sadly the game also falls flat on it's face due to lack of variety in combat, with there being all of 2 spells in the game from what I've seen, Normal and Frost. While this may not seem that bad they only do decent damage when you're equip with a staff, at which point the spell automatically becomes your default attack, making it pointless selecting it from the spell menu, even then the Frost spell is introduced so late in the demo (and is actually on a floor that you don't have to visit) that you can only use it in 1 fight.

The variety is somewhat lacking here.

The music seems to be from a variety of sources, and there are enough tracks in the game to prevent the songs from becoming grating, it's also quite fitting.
The graphics range from bad to plausible, the portraits aren't fantastic, the tiles are simple and boring to look at. What really stands out in this game are the character sprites, especially the hero's battle sprite considering that this is what you'll be seeing every battle I think that this was really well done.
I'd like to point out that Voltire has this strange habit of using inconsistent spacing between words in textboxes. In the game I noticed only 2 spelling errors, so that's a plus.

Despite The Tower having a few flaws it's not a half bad game in it's current state and with a bit of work could be great, Voltire has done a great job of taking the format that The Enchanted Cave used and making it his own, this game is well deserving of being finished and I would love to see an update of this at some point.