Throughout this early journey as I seek to review these early FMs, a problem has plagued me: How do I define my ratings for these Fan missions? If it's on a consistant scale of quality carried from modern FMs, then logically most of these should be 1-2 at best. No 4s, no 6s... But then I put "torben the traitor" in the same catagory as "down we go!" which hardly seems fair.

Now I realize, it's a scale from 1-7, mostly based on how much fun I had playing it. Regardless of time it was made, or complexity. (8-10 require a bit more work, but that's an unfortunate necessity: I need to save some numbers for missions that are truly exceptional in a way that these early missions are unlikely to be.)

I know this, because when I played Tower of Illusion, I didn't have fun. Not even Ironic "It's a quirky old FM" fun.

OK so This is a sequel to bear pits. You have fled the pits, and now are travelling up a hammerite tower to enter oblivion. However between you and that goal are a couple of weird puzzle-type things, and then a large number of hammerites who seem quite upset that you have violated the law.
The first few minutes of the FM are bizzare, but fine. You jump into a pool of water, and fall out the other side. There is a leap of faith puzzle that has a pretty cool twist, and then we reach the bulk of the mission.

Remember in Bearpits how we found our lockpicks? Well the author didn't. So off you go to hunt some down, now located in two different rooms. Once you do, you get the ultimate reward we all want. The ability to pick locks. This is such a great reward, the author decided to make pretty much all doors lockpickable, and then in those rooms you open up there are footlockers, which also require lockpicks. Some of them are empty, purely existing to satisfy your need to lockpick.

Sarcasm aside, the rest of the design is... fine I guess? Very boxy, but with a couple of genuinely OK looking rooms, and one which is downright impressive. However this is alongside poorly aligned stairs. It's a pure hammerite mission, with only a handful of token undead in the crypt, so variety is low.

Ultimately, unless you really feel like picking some locks in boxy rooms and corridors, this mission is best avoided.