Developer: ACE Team |
Publisher: ATLUS USA |
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PC |
Price: $14.99 (There’s a ~33% launch discount for two weeks on Steam and for PS Plus subscribers!) Where to buy: Steam, PSN |
Genre: Indie, Action Adventure |
Release date: January 19th, 2016
For this review we played the game on PC
Growing up in the 80’s in retrospective you and I seen our fair share of overly cheesy films. Some being great films. Others being so bad that they were amazingly funny. Making them as cult classics. The Deadly Tower of Monsters is to that standard in story telling. It starts you off with a introduction to a narrator who was the director of a “film” of the games title. Just about everything you do is just about narrated as you move forward in the game. It is a top-down-side style shooter mixing elements of gameplay frequently. One moment you are getting the vibe of a twin stick shooter. Next you are shooting down flying saucers with large one eyed brains in them. Most having that slick stop motion animation to it. Any-who lets crack on how I felt with the gameplay.
As mentioned above you are given a twin stick shooter. Mixing in some melee weapons that you may upgrade as you go with Gears. This applies two to the guns you require along the way. This varies from simple ray-guns to flame throwers. Even a joke tossed in was one of the guns is a electric razor. You know the one you shave… never mind. This all comes in doses as you move along the game, which actually feels a lot like a metroidvania game. In order to go to one place you must collect this item or that item for certain characters.Those said characters then must unlock places to help you get ahead. This is a touch of that classic adventure vibe I really enjoy in games. The game does do it pretty well enough for its pace. There are three core elements of game styles that shift around. A free fall mode that makes you shoot enemies off with the right thumb stick plus pressing X to shoot down saucers or various creatures that can simply fly. Think a tiny bit of Starfox, without the polygon ships and space stuff. Unless you count the space suits everyone seems to rock. Then there is the platforming. The game for the most part confines to this mode by default. As you soon reach the tower. You know the whole game this is based on. You then are tasked with going through all sorts of traps and many events involving defending from enemies coming from below. Via Space invader symbols. As well as flaming logs of doom! You are not only tackling that stuff. There is monsters that might look close to many iconic monster films or original enemies. Such as giant gorillas, smaller apes, dinosaurs, lizard people flying saucers, and more.They all look and act like from the films or short films they portrait. This includes things like stop motion and or stringed creatures showing strings as they fly about. Mostly for comic effect. The game overall did leave a good impression on me personally. You get a good flow of humor plus easy to pick up and play style to everything. One downer does come into effect. Nothing beyond what I mentioned seems to evolve beyond simple weapon leveling by finding gears hidden or common throughout the game. It keeps it self in the safe zone with the arcade elements of the platforming genre. Safe sometimes is good. This game itself keeps the fun factor level at least with binding the humor over the ambiance. The story and humor behind the game keeps you going if you love a good laugh. Games that make fun of themselves usually show plenty of character. Some might see this as a bane to the games existence. To that opinion I simply usually roll my eyes as most games commonly have this trait. Usually hidden behind flashy explosions or fan service to blind sight the big picture. This game is built for fans of the classic golden age of cheesy to iconic world of older films or or comics alike. I can say one thing. I tip my hat off to the creative nature of the presentation. Which in turn gives the gameplay bold enjoyment past what I have mentioned before hand.
The story itself is basically just more or less themed off of iconic themes from classic sci-fi films. You have cheesy props, all the way down to the bad acting. Which in this game is completely intentional. Adding to the charm I grew into soon. The plot is basically a director from a B movie mentioned above going through bits and pieces of a cult classic film he made under, you guessed it, a budget. This all of course is for a produced DVD for the said movie. You control Dick Starspeed, Scarlet Nova, and The Robot. Each as fore-mentioned again above using certain powers. Dick and Robot are comrades in the story’s plot. To sum up the story short without too much in terms of spoilers(as all of the mentioned is in the first freaking minutes of the game) You start off as Dick. Dick explores the planet Gravoira, which is a unknown and hostile planet. When landing he looses his gear and his buddy o’ pal Robot. Soon after you encounter Scarlet. Who is the daughter of the menacing Ming the Merciless, I mean just The Emperor! You can easily see the cliches the game oozes from. Using it as a canvas of already humbled instances of iconic to the cheesy pasts we can relate too. All of the characters bad voice acting (done on purpose) is hilarious! I can already see people think this was all unintentional and easily bash the game for it. Suffering from a sort of mental dyslexia to the idea. This is fine it was not made for them. I loved the story telling in the game. As if I was really watching a cheesy DVD bonus feature to a film that so many hipsters go to midnight watches off while sitting off of skim-milk lattes.
In Closing:
The game itself parodies everything possible in terms of the movie genre or the b movie scene with loads of great humor behind it. The gameplay it self is nothing new. It is still pretty fun however if you were expecting a new type of wheel to be invented you will not find it here. Twin stick shooters are also not a fresh thing at this point in gaming. I played through the game in about seven hours with some pause breaks and plenty of back tracking. I am a big fan of games who offer exploration as well as that hybrid vibe from adventure games. The ones I am talking about are like Metroid or Castlevania Symphony of the Night. I was overly surprised by this put into the game as its husk to the world. You basically have to use the three characters Dick, Scarlet and Robot to go back to older areas and break open inflatable blocks to find golden cogs which are used to upgrade weapons, which luckily enough only need one upgrade to make stronger. Each character you can level up too. You can level your characters up to level twenty four. putting points into things like weapon strength and regen for abilities and even life buffs.
Recommended –
If you love games like Diablo 3 plus arcade style titles. If you have a funny bone that grinds plenty of humor. Finally the sci-fi genre it makes apart of it.
