An Endless Climb
Review
Tower of Guns, Terrible
Posture Games (PS4)
Abstract: Tower of Guns, released
by Terrible Posture Games on the PS4 in April, is a game with a lot of big
ideas, but perhaps even bigger problems. Despite a solid foundation, gameplay
that gets stale quickly and an unrewarding sense of progression dampened my
enthusiasm for the final product. Tower
of Guns was great to play for a couple hours, but lacked any compelling reason
to return once the game shows you what is had to offer.
In Tower of Guns your climb never ends, as you ascend further and
further up a deadly tower only to die or repeat again. An intriguing enough
premise, and one that got me excited when the title was first announced as free
with a PlayStation Plus subscription. Reading a bit more about the game, I
quickly found out that Tower of Guns
is a Roguelike first-person shooter that was met with positive reviews when it
first launched on PC in Spring 2014. Made primarily on the back of a single
developer, Joe Mirabello, Tower of Guns
looked to have a lot going for it. As a big fan of Roguelikes I booted up Tower of Guns as soon as I had it
downloaded to see what the game had to offer.
Tower of Guns, created by Terrible Posture Games, was released for PS4 in April
2015. You play as an ever changing character whose purpose is always the same:
pick your starting gun and move your way through floor after floor of deadly
enemies as you work your way to the top of a mysterious tower. Exposition is
limited to in-game text bubbles that appear at the top of the screen. While a
functional system, I certainly would have liked a little more. The text would
often appear at inopportune moments that, if you stopped to try to read them,
would result in your death. For that reason, my deciphering of the story is
tenuous at best. From what I gathered, you play as several adventurers who are
doomed to traverse the gun filled tower for one reason or another. In some of
these scenarios, you’re traveling to the top of the tower to destroy a deadly
artificial intelligence; in another you’re trying to defeat a final boss to
break your family’s curse. There is no real plot to Tower of Guns,
however. Humor and mystery go hand-in-hand in these expository moments, giving
the player just enough to want to know a little more. For a game like Tower of Guns gameplay and design are
key, and story is secondary. It certainly felt that way while playing through
the game.
 |
| Why are you shooting these flying robot drones? Your guess is as good as mine. Not that it matters so much. |
Each time you start a session
in Tower of Guns you are placed at
the bottom of the tower. Moving through each floor involves a couple of
elements: destroy the enemies in your way, traverse platforms and obstacles,
and reach and defeat the level’s final boss. The player must get through five
to six floors to reach the final boss who, upon being defeated, allows the
player to start another run at the tower. A run through can take anywhere from
10-45 minutes, which is a perfect length for a Roguelike. In between attempts
you can unlock new starting guns and equipable abilities, allowing you to
tailor your experience more to your liking. As a Roguelike, Tower of Guns features randomized floor
layouts, enemy placement, and bosses. In theory, this makes the game feel fresh
and new every time you jump in. Due to the small number of enemy and boss types,
as well as the limited pool of ‘chunks’
from which the game pulls to assemble the levels, however, each session of Tower of Guns feels largely the same. This
isn’t inherently a problem. For example, in Rogue
Legacy, another Roguelike recently released for the PS4, each run through
feels similar. And this is fine because Rogue
Legacy has a fun gameplay loop and a compelling sense of progression as you
build up your stats or unlock more powerful weapons to use. This is not the
case in Tower of Guns.
The biggest issue with Tower of Guns is the gameplay. The game
is a first person shooter (FPS) with platforming and bullet hell elements. From
a gameplay perspective, Tower of Guns
takes obvious inspiration from old school FPS games like Doom or Quake. You
character is just a floating gun in front of you, moving around through these
3D environments. Movement is lightning fast—whether you’re moving forward or
strafing or jumping, your character is rapidly propelling through the world.
Certain powerups can be found in game that further augment your movement,
adding to both walk speed and number of jumps. Gun in hand, your character
blazes around the deadly tower seeking to destroy and explore. On the
destruction front, your character begins with the gun you selected before
starting a new session. Killing enemies causes powerups to drop, which can be
collected to increase the power and firing rate of your gun. I really enjoyed
the weapons Tower of Guns had to
offer, but I wish there were more to choose from. Even after putting in some
time and accomplishing specific goals to unlock more, your selection of
starting weapons is pretty limited. The real issue however, is that the
shooting gameplay just isn’t fun. For starters, enemy design is problematic. A
handful of exceptions aside, essentially every enemy in Tower of Guns is a stationary turret. This is where the bullet hell
elements come in. Each room tasks you to navigate an onslaught of projectiles
from these turrets before getting within striking distance. Because you are in
a first person view, however, dodging can be tricky and I often found myself
taking damage from projectiles that were not even on screen. Further, since the
enemies are mainly these turrets, destroying them gets boring quickly. There’s
no real challenge to it; the player usually ends up strafing around in circles
to dodge projectiles, keeping the aiming reticle on the turret until it
explodes, and then moving on to the next target. More often than not I just
held the firing button down as there was little penalty for it. Nothing in the
game really tests your FPS abilities, which is a serious weakness. Back to
talking about movement, the systems are functional but not entirely engaging.
Completing platforming sections in first person can always be a little tricky,
but I never found them to be too problematic here.
 |
| Yikes, that's a LOT of projectiles. |
When thinking about the
gameplay and design of Tower of Guns,
I found myself always wanting just a little bit more. The gunplay is fine and
has a solid foundation, but I wish the game has done more to let you really
explore the power of each of the guns, rather than just running around in a
circle with the shooting button held down. I enjoyed the randomization of the
floor layouts, but wish that there had been more total level elements. After
only five or six runs I began encountering floors with essentially identical
construction. I liked the idea of the enemies, but so much more could have been
done to improve upon them. Killing the same four of five enemies for hours on
end led Tower of Guns to become
predictable and boring pretty fast. Tower
of Guns had some pretty cool end-level bosses that uniquely tested players’
shooting and bullet hell skills, but there were equally as many bosses that
were just bigger versions of the boring turret enemies you face constantly. Finally,
I enjoyed the powerups in game that increased movement speed or number of jumps
but often found myself wishing for more powerups with more unique effects. And
I recognize just how close Tower of Guns
is to pulling all of this off. One run out of my thirty or so was fantastic. In the first floor or two I
found a couple hidden weapons that changed how I fought my enemies, an
incentivized me to level each of them up. A couple more secrets later, my jump
height was dramatically increased and I was soaring through the levels. I felt
unstoppable (until I died to the final boss). These bonuses changed the way I
played that session of Tower of Guns
and it felt great. Because of how rare or inaccessibly hidden some of these
items are, though, I never had a run like this again. Making discoverable guns
or impactful powerups more common would have gone a long way towards
reinvigorating each new attempt at the tower.
 |
| More starting guns or abilities could have gone a long way. Or at the very least, let me find more of them during my run. |
Tower of Guns also lacks one of the best aspects of Roguelikes: the feeling of
getting better the more you play. One of the main reasons I find Roguelikes so
compelling is the idea that you, the player, are the experience points. The
more you play the better you get. My
favorite Roguelike and one of my top five games of all time, Spelunky, offers this feeling in spades.
The more you play, the more you understand the game world—what you can, and can’t,
get away with. Like how certain traps function, or the arc of your bomb throws.
In Rogue Legacy you are rewarded with
an incremental sense of progression, as leveling up stats or buying new weapons
will let you more comfortably tackle progressively more difficult areas. Over
the course of the roughly eight hours I spent with Tower of Guns, I never felt like I was gaining new skills or
getting better at navigating the world. My deaths were often a result of me
walking into a projectile-filled death trap or not finding enough powerups to
deal or take enough damage in the higher floors. Like I mentioned earlier, dodging
projectiles that are not on screen is impossible, which can cheapen deaths on
some of the later levels. Without the sense you’re getting better the more you
play, the less incentivized I was to keep playing.
 |
| After only a couple runs I felt I reached my skill ceiling for Tower of Guns. I got really good at strafing in a circle and shooting, I'm sure of that. |
I’m glad to have tried Tower of Guns, but I just wish there was
more to the final package. I enjoyed the aesthetic of the world, which was
filled with some cool environments and some nice humor. Exploring the world was
fun, and I certain felt compelled to scour each floor for its hidden secrets. For
a game that relies so heavily on gameplay, however, Tower of Guns falls flat. The tower beat me I guess.
Tower of Guns
2/5
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