Tower of Guns Review

Speaking of features that disrupt the pace, Tower of Guns does the brawler thing where all your vanquished foes drop multicoloured orbs that help you along in some way: restoring health, refilling your item's recharge gauge, granting you money and experience points. It sounds like a relatively innocuous feature but suffers from the chance meeting of two unfortunate facts: first, these orbs disappear after only a short delay, and second, you're going to want to pick absolutely every single one up if you want to avoid getting gratuitously gibbed around the third or fourth floor. This leads to a recurring situation where it's impossible to concentrate on the fighting at hand for more than a few seconds at a time, because every time you kill an enemy or two you have to dash madly over to where they were before you disintegrated them – bearing in mind that you're still getting shot at, naturally – and obsessive-compulsively hoover up all the shinies that they just dropped. As far as gameplay goes, it's a thankless task that only serves to provide constant interruptions to the flow of the action, like a Carmageddon sequel where you have to pull over and exchange insurance details every time you crash into somebody. It's all the more a thorn in my side because there are upgrades and even a perk that help to alleviate this, so the fact that it's an annoying addition is not only acknowledged but actively worked into the game. What's the reasoning there, eh? “Well, maybe chasing around all these orbs like a deranged Smarties addict instead of shooting things does break up the flow somewhat, but if players don't like that then they can just sacrifice their one and only perk for it! Or, even better, rely on randomly acquiring an enormous Smartie magnet as they go through the game!” Why can't we have the system that Risk of Rain used, eh? I kill the baddie, and the resulting Smarties slowly home in on my location like the world's worst aggressive marketing campaign. Simple.

The perks that I mentioned are one of the character traits that you select in Tower of Guns' pre-game menu, with the other being the selection of your primary weapon (and, unless you're exceedingly lucky and find one elsewhere in the game, your only weapon). Again, they're decently varied – especially in the case of the weapons, which once again remind me of Unreal Tournament to an almost suspicious degree – but when you first start playing you'll only have two weapons and one perk unlocked, with the rest sealed away behind stupid arbitrary conditions that you must first meet, like 'kill 24 tanks' or 'find five health upgrades in one playthrough' or 'slam your head against the desk three times in despair because you're going to have to play for hours with a rubbish pistol to unlock all the good stuff'. Actually, that last part isn't quite true. While I still believe that many of the unlockable weapons and perks are superior to the ones you start off with, the gulf isn't large enough to warrant the kind of ire that Rogue Legacy weathered. It's still an annoyance, but I think we can let this one slide. Just this once, you hear?

Anyway, here's a piece of criticism I never thought I'd put to paper (or hard drive, you pedant): the game's developer is too friendly. Now, in this day and age that's right up there with 'there aren't enough microtransactions' and 'I wish there were more pre-animated sequences dotted with quick-time events in place of actual gameplay', but it really is a genuine issue. A lot of the text and dialogue outside of the main story is written as personal messages directly from the developer to the player, and – without meaning any offence to the chap – it can get rather overbearing. Look, mate, I know you're proud of your game. I would be too. Now, can you please stop reminding me that you made it? I know immersion was never going to be abundant in a game like this, but having you lean over my shoulder and try to get chatty every now and then really isn't helping it. And for crying out loud, stop awarding me a free cache of upgrades every ten runs. So much of the satisfaction in any game with roguelike elements is procured from being able to build yourself up over the course of a run. Getting half of your power handed to you on a silver platter before the game has even started just feels cheap and empty, like beating a senile homeless man in the park at chess because he passed out after the first three moves.

Another of Tower of Guns' points that could be compared to winning board games against the terminally comatose (we're really rolling in the segues today, aren't we?) is its boss battles, which happen at the end of every floor. With the exception of one particular boss that's like being trapped in a giant blender with a bunch of inconsiderate ice skaters, and another secret boss that I won't spoil because it's frankly horrifying to behold, they are outright pathetic. Sure, they're all fairly creative in their design, finding new and interesting ways to bombard me with waves of projectiles, but it hardly matters in the end because they seldom manage to survive long enough to deliver any more than their first attack. Being a big target? Sounds fine, it means they're at least intimidating. Being a big, slow-moving target? Sure, as long as they dish out enough damage. But being a big slow-moving target with a tiny health bar? That's not a boss battle, that's what happened on the primary school playground when the fat kid got into a scrap. Even the few bosses that buck this trend are vulnerable to the oldest technique in the book – that is to say, circle-strafing away and shooting until one of you dies.

Oh yes, and people who can't function without tessellation and ambient occlusion in their lives should probably note that the game's aesthetic is... well, unique. In a lot of ways it reminds me of PS1-era platformers like Rayman 2 or Crash Bandicoot or Croc, full of low polycounts and textures that sport a hand-drawn cartoon look. I ended up liking it, mostly because it suits the exaggerated, silly tone of a game where every enemy that gets thrown at you looks like the sort of thing that Wile E. Coyote might have utilised once he got desperate and started ordering his equipment from Acme's black market competitor, but there is one facet of it that gobbed in my eye, and that's its impact. Let's talk about it.

Impact is a difficult thing to accomplish. Impact is what you get when you decimate a legion of charging Kleer with a cannonball in Serious Sam and start to giggle uncontrollably like a schoolgirl. Impact is what you get when somebody unloads a flak cannon into you at point-blank range in Unreal Tournament and you instinctively skitter backwards in your seat a few inches. Impact is what you get from absolutely every last thing that happens in Brutal Doom. There are plenty of effective ways to accomplish impact – sound design, animation, visual effects – but its ultimate goal is gratification: to lend weight to the action and make the weapon in your hands feel as powerful as it looks. Tower of Guns, in contrast to the games mentioned above, has all the impact of a light breeze upon a fair maiden's skin. Firing every single weapon, no matter how over-the-top its concept, feels like launching paper planes at your foes with a tube full of compressed air, likewise for the numerous projectiles flying towards you. There are turrets that launch enormous spiked balls, large enough that you'd expect them to turn anything organic that gets in their way into a well-tenderised steak without even slowing down, but they just bounce around with no sense of weight, glancing off your toned flanks like oversized novelty beach balls. Keeping visuals clean in a game with so much chaotic action going on is a must, of course, but Tower of Guns is so lacking that anything less than fifty enemies on screen at once just feels underwhelming.

Also – and there's no way I can possibly say this without sounding like the kind of deranged, violence-obsessed, gun-stroking psycho that the rest of the gaming enthusiast sphere does its best to avoid associating with, but it must be done – there just isn't as much gratification to be gained in mowing down faceless emotionless robots than, say, a squishy foe with a clear moral motivation against you. Again, this isn't helped by the fact that everything that dies in Tower of Guns just vanishes in a weedy puff of Looney Tunes smoke and scatters its immediate surroundings with a handful of bolts and shrapnel.

In all honesty, though, I have griped far too long and too pettily about a game that – occasional sloppy design aside – I thoroughly enjoyed. Mechanically, Tower of Guns is perfectly sound, and – barring the occasional indestructible ghost-enemy or some dodgy collision meshes – it's sufficiently polished too. Picture Tower of Guns as a snack of a game; a proper single-player shooter that can still run to a satisfying original conclusion when you don't have the time or willpower to dedicate yourself to a full-length experience. It's not especially deep, and it certainly isn't the sort of thing that you play from beginning to end over several sittings, but then again it doesn't really need to be. It's a quick rush of ludicrous, old-school, context-free first-person action with oodles of replayability, and if that doesn't sound like fun to you then I'm afraid we can't be friends any more.