Forward to the Sky

     The story goes that a Princess seeing a mythical floating tower decides to find out the mystery of the Witch and the crystals that once were mined by the people. The player takes the role of the princess and converses with the Witch as she progresses through the 6 floors, collecting crystals, and learning what is the truth of the legendary stories of the Witch.

     Combat is handled by mashing either your quick attack or heavy attack repeatedly (ala Dynasty Warriors). There really is not any skill to this, but as some enemies have magic spells and shields, expect to take a beating at times. Every time you kill a skeleton it will drop a crystal, each level allows you to collect 100 crystals; either by mob death or finding little statues that blow up into 10-20. Collecting 100 will guarantee the 3 pages from the story for that chapter. Do this for each chapter to get those achievements!

     There are different levels of this tower, but they are all the same. It does not really make sense why some of the levels are night time, and others are blue skies, but they are there! The levels will increase in mechanics and traps, and since you do not have to worry about running out of lives, some of the mechanics are a pain in the butt, you have infinite tries. I am looking at you jump rings!!!!

     There are plenty of puzzles to go through to get you to the goal. Some are super easy, some are only hard because the game mechanics are not really tight. One of the more interesting ones are later when you have to use a beam and touch crystals to uncover walls and staircases. Unfortunately these laser walls also show numerous bugs in the game where the walls have Sorting issues. (Note: Sorting is when you can see one texture through another causing an odd looking art effect.)

     The game is pretty decent and has a playthrough time of around 2 hours. There is no reason to really play the game more than once, unless you are after the achievements. It would have been nice to have a special costume or weapon after completing it, but no, you get your 5 levels and boss fight and you are done.

     The final boss fight is kind of a drag and not very exciting. It had a lot of VO playing that kind of distracted from the actual fight. It was more annoying seeing the text boxes pop up at the wrong times. The phases of the fight were unintuitive, and one of the phases has issues with walking up the crystal arms, so be ready to fall off them a lot!

     I do recommend the game if you are a platform-lite player and dug old PS2 games. The developers tout a "Zelda-esque" game, but other than being 3D, there is no comparison. This is just a platform game that is more like playing Spyro without upgrades, there is no in-depth game mechanic that says otherwise. It is worth the $7.99 buy in, but it goes on sale for under $5, so I would hit that price up as it is very short.