What you need to know
- Tower of Fantasy, which launched in China as a Genshin Impact competitor, is coming to PC and mobile.
- Players can sign up for a closed beta test that starts in April.
- The game is a post-apocalyptic, open-world RPG with gacha mechanics.
Genshin Impact has been an immense success globally, so it only makes sense that there will be competitors. One of the more high-profile ones is Tower of Fantasy, which was announced back in 2020 and has been currently available only in China.
On Tuesday, publisher Level Infinite (a part of Tencent) and developer Hotta Studio announced the game will be coming to the West on PC and mobile (including Android and iOS). While no release date is set yet, fans or those who are merely curious can sign up for a closed beta test, which will begin in April. You can sign up on the official website March 15-29.
Tower of Fantasy is an anime-inspired, open-world RPG with gacha mechanics set on a post-apocalyptic world called Aida. Humans fled Earth to Aida due to dwindling resources and through an effort to capture the energies of a comet, caused a largescale disaster. Players will get to explore this world (either alone or with friends) fighting against enemies with characters, who each come with a unique weapon.
We can't confirm ourselves what the gacha system will entail, but a YouTuber showed off how you can use currency to try and pull for weapons and gadgets, instead of characters like in Genshin Impact. This scans with some information from the press release, which states that players can change up their playstyles "on the fly" by switching between characters and weapons.
Mobile game fans have been speculating about when the game will make its way to other countries for a while. There was some chatter that the international version had been canceled, but the team tweeted on Feb. 11 that it was currently in the works.
Tower of Fantasy itself has been embroiled in some controversy since its release. Reddit users found that the team was allegedly stealing Genshin Impact reviews with bots to boost their App Store rating. In a more bizarre situation (detailed well on this Reddit post), players noticed non-Chinese players in the game, with one finding a Discord server distributing Chinese IDs, a lot of which came from missing persons from a landslide disaster.
