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Tower of Guns is a roguelike first-person shooter where you fight your way through increasingly difficult floors of enemies to reach the top of the tower.
Gameplay
Combat shares a lot of similarities with many old-school shooters: fast-paced movement, assorted power-ups, and a lack of reloading. It’s been slightly polished and refined, but it still plays about the same. I enjoyed the old-school style at first, but it did get a bit repetitive after a while, especially because of the game’s roguelike aspects, the most notable of which is the upgrade system. While playing, you will come across minor stat boosts, which can give you more health, damage, speed, and so on. Technically, this qualifies the game as a roguelike, but just barely. Outside of a handful of upgrades, each playthrough will mostly be shaped by the weapon and trait you choose when starting the game. There’s a decent variety of guns and they are fun to try out, but once you settle on a favorite, every run will play out the same way. It lacks the addictive “one more run” quality of better roguelikes. Once I beat it, I played a few more times with new guns, but I had already seen everything the game had to offer.
Visual Design
Easily my favorite part of Tower of Guns is the enemy design. Most are actually stationary turrets, almost as if you are playing a tower defense game from the first-person view of an attacker. Bosses are typically robotic behemoths and are generally well-designed, with the final boss being my personal favorite. Among standard enemies, even the smallest ones are taller than you, really making it feel like you are an insignificant person in a monstrous deathtrap. The huge, wide-open levels give you a sense of the sheer scale of the enemies you are up against. It’s a completely different vibe than most first-person roguelikes, and it works well here.
Unfortunately, while enemies may have a great theme as a group, they are repetitive individually. Even with all the different turrets you’ll face, they look and feel roughly the same. It’s not terrible, but it further exacerbates the game’s lack of replayability.
Graphics and Audio
Graphically, everything is heavily stylized, almost like a cartoon or comic book. The color palette is a bit drab, but it fits the setting, even if it doesn’t look great. All in all, it looks like a mid-range indie game and that’s enough for me.
The soundtrack isn’t one of my favorites, but it does a good job setting a different tone for each chapter/area. On the other hand, the overall sound design is a bit of a missed opportunity. Most of the sound effects are fine, but it could have really elevated the atmosphere with some better audio.
Story
This might be the only game I’ve played with a toggle for turning off the plot. It’s an odd decision, but it makes a lot of sense for Tower of Guns. The vast majority of players are here for the Unreal Tournament-esque gameplay, not a gripping narrative. Many games that focus on gameplay over story still include a narrative out of obligation, but it typically detracts from the experience. A story toggle gives the player the ability to tailor their experience to whatever they want. If they want some goofy dialogue to break up the monotony, they can have it with the touch of a button, but they also have the option to focus exclusively on the gameplay and turn off the story if they know they won’t care about it. With the dialogue enabled, a random storyline is selected and each level reveals a small piece of the plot through a text pop-up. It’s certainly an unusual idea to have a different narrative for each playthrough, but it’s only set dressing. The stories are, by necessity, surface-level; losing a run means the plot gets cut short, so it makes sense for the developer to have ~20 small stories instead of a few big ones.
Verdict
While Tower of Guns is a solid blend of retro shooter and roguelike, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. It shines when you focus on the combat, but the roguelike mechanics leave a lot to be desired. The setting and premise are surprisingly unique, especially in a genre that’s oversaturated as it is. Overall, I’d strongly recommend ToG to fast-paced shooter fans, but roguelike fans might be dissatisfied with the lack of meaningful randomization and thus, replayability.
7/10
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No performance issues running on: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 3070
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