The Apogee Shareware Series, Part VII
Platform: PC (DOS)
Developer: Animation F/X
Publisher: Apogee Software
Release Date: July 15, 1994
Genre: Platformer, Role-Playing
Nerd Rating: 7.5 out of 10
This installment in my Apogee series is a little gem called Mystic Towers, possibly one of the most inventive titles present on my old shareware disc. Most of the other titles are side-scrolling platformers, with a couple being first-person shooters and at least one being an arcade shooter, all of which are very represented genres today. Mystic Towers, on the other hand, is an isometric platformer with roleplaying elements delivered with an arcade style, a combination that I don’t believe I’ve ever seen out of any game since. Add in aging protagonist Baron Baldric, a plethora of intelligent monsters, and an array of combat and utility spells to get you through any pinch, and I have to wonder why nobody’s tried mimicking this gameplay formula yet. Is it because the game was ahead of its time and everyone’s overlooked it since, or does it just do too many things to keep track of? If you’re looking to find out, then grab your spells and follow me!
Baron Baldric’s policy changes in Rimm Village were quite troubling, especially when he personally demonstrated his idea of Pantsless Thursdays…and Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays…
Mystic Towers was made in 1994 by Australian developer Animation F/X as a sequel to a game that they only released in Australia, the original game being Baron Baldric: A Grave Adventure. Apogee Software published and distributed Mystic Towers internationally, and the introduction summarizes the plot of the first and picks up where it left off: Baron Baldric has successfully saved his barony from the presence of Baron Lazarus, his evil ancestor, but there are still a series of Mystic Towers that Lazarus left behind, each one populated with hideous creatures that roam out and plague the lands. The crotchety mage is called out of retirement to visit each tower, clear out the infestation of magical beasts, destroy its monster generator, and lock up the tower when he’s done so that their presence won’t threaten the land ever again. With magical booby-traps lying in wait and stir-crazy creatures stalking about, this early-bird dungeon delving will take every ounce of Baron Baldric’s wizened wizard wit to survive.
It’s important to pay attention to the HUD, but don’t let it distract you too much, or else some enterprising monster might gnaw your ankles off.
The gameplay of Mystic Towers starts off with the heads-up interface, which can be intimidating the first time you see it, as it looks like you’re being given too much information. So many bars with so many things, so many options, I just want to fight monsters in a dungeon! Thankfully, once you get familiar with the game, everything that the interface shows you proves useful. It gives you a lot at a glance, such as how much health you have, what floor and room of the dungeon you’re in, if there are any monsters nearby, and so forth, making it an invaluable tool in letting you know what you have to work with and planning out what to do next. It also eases the learning curve by showing you where the controls are mapped to on your keyboard, and even letting you control what you do in the game by mouse, if you prefer. I would say that a heads-up display like this is pretty similar in effectiveness to games like Diablo, and I’m not saying that just because they’re both isometric perspective role-playing games. Well, not intentionally, anyways.
Baron Baldric can pick up spell charges just as he does food and drink items. Pick up better spells when you can, because your iceball really isn’t gonna cut it.
Baron Baldric controls pretty well in Mystic Towers, able to move in the game’s four cardinal directions (relatively speaking), jump over and on certain obstacles, push and pull objects to assist in platforming or simply get at the item under the poisoned mushroom without having to eat the mushroom first. He can protect himself with an array of offensive spells, and has a number of utility spells that are just as important, given how useful they can be in the right circumstances. As long as you keep the Baron fed and watered during his dungeon delving, there’s not too much to worry about with him. Some of the monsters can be faster than him, but as long as you play smart, this won’t be as problematic as you’d think, since the fast monsters tend to be rather chaotic. I will say that the Baron’s tendency to goof off at random can be a pain, as while it shows the baron’s personality, it’s much less endearing when Baldric does a silly twirl or a flip of the lips right when you wanted to run away from a monster that’s about to eat him. It’s scarce enough to be excusable for the most part, but I’d still prefer that it only happen when there aren’t monsters around.
Apprentice Towers place the Tower Key on this yellow table right in the starting room, but Wizard Towers hide the yellow table on another floor. It ain’t over ’til it’s over, baby!
The goal of Mystic Towers is to clear out all five floors of the monsters that inhabit them, destroy the monster generator with a Bomb spell, and exit the dungeon using the tower key that spawns once the other tasks are complete. The tower display in the lower-left corner shows floors in red when there’s monsters roaming around them, and in white when they’ve been cleaned out, making it easier to know where to go next. Finding a Bomb spell can be a little more difficult, but since you can only use the Bomb spell on the monster generator, you thankfully can’t make your tower unwinnable by accidentally using it in the wrong place. The game’s fairly straightforward objectives mean that the only thing that tends to be complicated in this game is the layout of the towers, which is understandable, as without puzzles and obstacles to traveling through the tower, this game would be too easy. The Apprentice Towers, the first half of the game, give you the maps and the tower key pretty readily, and allows all teleport circles to link in a ring for simplicity. The second half’s Wizard Towers, however, tend to play hardball with you on all of these fronts, along with making the monsters stronger and the traps more dangerous.
Baron Baldric throws a fireball at a Writwraith. Be careful, he might go on strike…with a lightning bolt! But seriously, this guy’s pretty dangerous.
Speaking of monsters and traps, Mystic Towers doesn’t disappoint. The magical creatures are quite innovative, with extra credit to the developers for slipping in some amusing jokes and references, and they also pose a worthy challenge. The game features reactive monster AI, meaning that while they usually wander aimlessly through the rooms, if you start attacking them, they’ll start reacting to you, usually by coming for you to do some real damage. Some of them will retreat when they’re low on health, while others will go ballistic and start firing spells off wildly in all directions. Figuring out how your monsters will react is a crucial skill if you want to stand up to the stronger monsters in the Wizard Towers later on. The traps are quite good too, with poison tiles occasionally hidden on the floor, openings in the wall that shoot fireballs at you, and rigged tiles that will drop a bomb on you if you walk over them. Mystic Towers isn’t the DOS-equivalent of Dark Souls or anything, these traps are simply well-placed to trip up the players who don’t pay attention to them, so if you’re cautious, most of them can be avoided. Together, the monsters and traps are well-implemented and go a long way to making the tower runs challenging and memorable.
The music is just what you’ve come to expect from Apogee-sponsored games, catchy arcade-style earworms that are just plain cool to boot. That said, the soundtrack of Mystic Towers is somewhat disappointing, clocking in at only six tracks, and half of them are barely even tracks at all. Only the main menu music and the two atmospheric tracks are of any note, and they’re pretty good. Judging by the names of the atmospheric tracks, there were probably more of them at one point, but I guess the developers decided to cut them because they weren’t as complete or they didn’t feel that they needed so much variety. Apogee almost never lets its published games get away with substandard sound either, and Mystic Towers continues this tradition. The graphics and scenery are nice and descriptive, you can almost always tell what you can interact with in a room and what you can’t, and every room feels like it has real depth, which is very important in an isometric game. There really isn’t much to harp on; this is simply a tightly-programmed and produced game.
Teleport circles can be very helpful while exploring the tower. So can power-ups, like the one shown on the upper left. They’re limited-duration, but powerful while they last.
So what do I think? Well, I’m still a bit surprised that it took four paragraphs to explain the gameplay, but Mystic Towers is such an intriguing mix of concepts and mechanics that I just had to let you take it all in. All of the elements have been done before and will continue to be utilized in their own ways, but this exact cocktail of all of them at once leads to a one-of-a-kind experience that I feel is rather refreshing. While it feels like there’s a lot going on, once you’ve found your way around the game, it really does work and you don’t need to take anything away to enjoy yourself with it. That said, while I wouldn’t play this every day, I still recommend it to anyone interested in a game that’s as creative as it is inventive! If you’re looking for any combination of dungeon-crawling, puzzle-solving, platform-jumping, role-playing goodness, or if you just want to enjoy running around in a medieval bathrobe casting spells, then you’re sure to enjoy Mystic Towers!
As with most of the DOS titles I review, you can pick up this game for free on Abandonware! Just follow the link, download it, load it into DOSBox, and you’ll be clearing towers in no time!
