"A game that's aptly titled"

Now this is genuinely interesting for an Intellivision magnum opus. A Dungeons & Dragons adventure game where you explore a vast dungeon, fight monsters, collect treasures, and use a variety of items during your quest to escape. First we can choose our character from an impressive lineup of warriors, knights, wizards, and stuff. Then select a game variation from an equally impressive list of dungeons to explore and conquer. There are many different dungeons here. Some of them have preset terrain features, with items and monsters that are always the same. Other dungeons have completely random floor plans, with helpful items randomly placed. Each dungeon has a different number of floors that must be conquered.

Before I begin here, I should point out that I played this on "Intellivision Lives" for the PS2. I don't know how well the game played with the original Intellivision keypad, and thanks to the lazy design of "Intellivision Lives" I didn't have access to the original manual for the game.

After making our selections, we move our guy around a multi-screen overhead-view dungeon full of corridors and rooms, searching for treasure and useful items, duking it out with monsters when they come on the scene, and... We've got control problems here. I'm having difficulty getting into passageways from a room. My guy keeps sliding past the corridor I want to go into unless I have him perfectly lined up with it.

This game has much going on in the "why did they make it this way?" department. Your inventory is represented by vague symbols in a box at the left side of the screen. There's a sword, an axe, something that looks like a spear, maybe... stuff that looks like a magic vial... something that might be a scroll. And they're in different colors. What is all of this stuff, and what do the colors mean? We're not told in what passes for the game's manual. It says "You'll have to find out what the items do" or something like that. Umm... How incredibly informative.

Now that I'm giving it some thought, this game seems reminiscent of numerous ASCII RPGs that were played on PCs. Much like "Dragon Crystal" and "Diablo" would later do, it adds a graphical flourish to something that would otherwise be represented with letters, numbers, and symbols on screen.

So I killed a few monsters, discovered that it displays their rotting corpses in the maze, collected a few items, and how do I use these items? Well, first you have to press a button to turn on the vague-looking "hand" icon in the inventory box. Then move it over the item you want to use, press a different button, and hope something happens. Sometimes nothing happens. Then there's an idiotic way of equipping weapons. Your equipped weapon appears on the top row of the inventory box, along with a question mark that you can use to see your adventurer's status (Strength, Stamina, Treasure, Score, and stuff scroll across the bottom of the screen). Anyway, if you accidentally move another item into the equipped position, you have no weapon to fight with. Then you have to figure out how to equip your weapon while a monster is mauling you. It doesn't help that I have no idea what any of this stuff does, what the colors mean, or what difference there is between the weapons... if there is a difference. You can also drop items, but you can't drop them in some of the corridors. So you have to find a room, fiddle with these clunky controls and hopefully drop the right item so you can go and pick up a new one.

To open a door that leads to a room, you have to face the door, activate that dopey hand thing in the inventory box, and move it over an icon of a door in the top row of icons. The door icon only shows up when you're facing a door. Likewise, they have a "down arrow" icon that only shows up when you're standing over a staircase that leads down to another dungeon floor. Wouldn't it have been infinitely easier to just walk up to a door and press an action button to interact with it? It's almost like the designers wanted the game to be as counter-intuitive as possible just to show that they could program this convoluted stuff in there.

On the dungeon floors are various traps that cause damage and... other things. I couldn't tell what it was doing most of the time. There's fire, some kind of green cloud, and colored circles. One of the circles confuses your directional controls. Are we having fun yet? Another circle stops your guy in his tracks, freezing him when you touch it. And these dopey traps are often placed in corridors that you have to travel through. So I move my guy into this circle thing, get stopped for a while, move a bit more, get stopped again, and so on, just to get through a corridor. How incredibly lame. There are teleporters that move you to a random position on the dungeon floor, and some of these are needed to advance to where the staircase is (the object of the game being to descend to the lowest floor of the tower and escape). Keep trying until you get lucky and it teleports you into a place you haven't been before.

I can't tell what most of the items are doing when I use them. I know what the crudely represented food does because it says "Life Force Maximum" when I use it. Another item garnered the very helpful message "Curses!" What, the thing cursed me? How? What just happened? What changed? I don't know because no one's telling me anything. Another item produced an amazingly prolific "Magic protects you". From what? From the monsters? From this game? What just happened? It's a mystery.

The visual presentation for this game is impressive during battles with monsters, not so much during exploration. The walls of the dungeon are thin blue lines on a black background, with various colored icons representing items and monsters. Doors are just a different colored line. The staircase at least looks like a staircase. These dull visuals, which compose a majority of the game, stand in stark contrast to the special battle screen that shows up when you meet a monster. It's a vividly rendered side-view of your guy in the dungeon facing off with the monster. The effort that went into this battle screen doesn't matter much, though, because I was mostly dispatching the monsters with a single swing of my sword (or whatever weapon I happened to be using; I can't tell if there's a difference between them). The game begins with a nice visual of the tower with the adventurer walking back and forth atop the tower before he descends into the first floor.

The only music in the game is during the brief battles with monsters, when a mish-mash of disjointed tones play to give us the impression that it's a dangerous encounter. That aside, there are a few effects for opening doors and doing other things. When we descend to a new floor in the dungeon, there's a nice scene showing a staircase with foot prints appearing on the steps while a sound of footsteps plays.

Tower Of Doom is a valiant effort for an 80s era adventure game on a home video game console. It greatly expands on what Atari started with "Adventure", and it's easily better than Atari's "Sword Quest" saga. But the lack of decent information about what's going on is rather crippling to the game-play. Also crippling is the inventory box and the way items are handled and used. It could have benefited from a better interface.

This is perhaps the best thing on the "Intellivision Lives" compilation. Remarkably, it's not the graphical quality that makes it an interesting game to play. I find this especially notable considering Intellivision's penchant for placing graphics above game-play during the 80s.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 09/12/11

Game Release: Tower of Doom (US, 1987)