Zavix Tower review by Rick Moscatello

[Doom]

[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]

Fantasy treadmill simulator




At first glance, Zavix Tower is an old school dungeon crawler: you slap together a party of heroes, then off to the dungeon to bash monsters and collect loot. That’s what it is at second and third glance, too. These types of games need three parts to be successful: story, combat, and character development.

Story here is, well, bleh. There’s a tower packed with monsters. You go in and kill things, level after level after level. It’s all random, though each level is comfortably small (ten rooms or so). There are some mindless random quests posted to Ye Olde Quest board (“Kill 5 wolves,” “Clear 5 levels,” etc), but it doesn’t matter whether you complete these quests or not. All we have here is a treadmill: enter dungeon, kill monsters, leave dungeon, repeat. The tower is infinite, there’s just no end to this.



Combat is turn based, and pretty crude. The guys in the front row can attack the enemies in the front row, and the guys in the back can help if they have reach weapons or (more likely) spells. You have mana and hit points, and you must use resource management to have enough firepower to win battles.

The dungeons themselves are the only thing about Zavix that’s unique, but not in a good way. You must always press forward; for some reason, if you want to leave, you can’t just backtrack…and you cannot run away from combat, either. All traps in the dungeon automatically hit everyone, nothing you can do about it. The monsters you meet on various levels are pure random, you’ll find demons hanging out with bats hanging out with elven pikemen…it’s pretty easy to meet something that will land a fluke shot killing a character. With a dead character, you’ll need find the way out, and the party will probably all be killed as you really need a full group after a dozen dungeon levels. Death, even a total party kill, is no big deal, only one character “permanently” die, and you resurrect him easily enough, although, again a strange design decision rears its head: the dead character will lose most of his equipment.



The town is functional but bland, of course…just click on the building you want and get what you need (eg, the blacksmith sells equipment, the academy sells skills for your characters, and so on).

Character development is likewise mediocre at best. As you gain levels, you increase your attributes, and get a skill point, to spend on a skill tree. The skills are, of course, flavorless, all +2% here, +3% there, stuff…nothing really changes how you’ll play the game, except a few wizard spells that give much needed area of effects.

For all its relentless mediocrity, a good story could have saved this game. A nice major quest, going through various themed dungeons to kill various Foozles would have kept me playing, but, bottom line, this is just a mindless treadmill. I just don’t see any reason for anyone to play Zavix, as it, quite literally, has nothing to offer that can’t be found in many other games, and most every other game does everything better than Zavix.

Overall Rating: 45.