Zavix Tower

Although it’s fairly obvious why brave heroes venture into dark dungeons, it’s a bit unclear why all the nasty creatures in existence prefer to spend their days in endless tunnels, with nothing to eat but the occasional adventurer. On top of it all, they may not have food or water, but even the lowliest goblin carries a pouch of gold and some sort of enchanted plate armor.

Zavix Tower is a first-person dungeon crawler still in development, yet the core concept should be clear to everyone, even if the fine touches are missing as of right now. In short, you lead a group of brave adventurers through a tower full of monsters and evil wizards, with the simple goal of getting stronger and acquiring better gear. It’s not a revolutionary idea, but then again the genre has been figured out in its entirety a long time ago.

The first and probably most satisfying component of the game is that it allows you to create the party yourself, by choosing the class for each character, spending every skill point, and even giving him/her a name. Obviously, you probably won’t survive for too long with a party made entirely out of rogues, but at least the option is there. You can have only four characters at first, but additional slots can be bought later on.

Repetition is to be expected in a dungeon crawler, because it’s meant to be a long and not very pleasant journey. However, Zavix Tower takes the cake in this regard, because all you do is walk from one room to the other and battle enemies in about 95% of them. Each room looks exactly the same, except for the ones that hold shrines to help you recover hit points, mana, or grant you various bonuses.

The actual combat is turn-based, which means that each character or creature has one chance to make a move, whether it’s to cast a spell or perform a normal attack. It would appear that there are no potions in the game, which means that you’ll quickly run out of mana to cast spells. Short of finding the right shrine, there’s not much you can do in this regard, and that’s incredibly frustrating.

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that there are optional purchases in the game, since it costs actual money to resurrect your fallen characters. You can obviously forget about it and just start over, but then you lose all your progress and all the gear you managed to loot.