Tower of Guns

How many bullets can we fit onto a single computer screen? We're sure that's what Joe Mirabello, the man behind Terrible Posture Games and the creator of Tower of Guns, must have asked himself before embarking on the project. We picture a breakfast table, where he sits contemplating the great mysteries of life over a cup of coffee. Why are we here, what is the meaning of life and how difficult can a videogame be while still remaining fun to play?

Tower of Guns is an exercise in patience, fortitude and old school twitch reflexes. It's an arcade game with an endless supply of enemies and a single goal, get to the top of the tower. The game experience is highly concentrated and according to the developer it shouldn't take more than an hour or two to complete it, if you've got what it takes. Tower of Guns is difficult. Not hard like playing the latest AAA game on the hardest difficulty setting, we're talking old old school tough. Mega Man and Quake difficult. So let this be your warning, Tower of Guns is not for everyone.

If you expect a certain amount of progress in a game you will be sorely disappointed. Most likely your first five or six runs in Tower of Guns will take place in the first two levels, the easy ones. You'll die a lot and upgrades and new weapons will be few and far between. Even when you manage to unlock something new the game doesn't become any easier, so to progress you just have to grit your teeth and man up.

Luckily the game is generated anew each time you restart, so you never know which enemies, which rooms or which bosses you'll encounter on each level of the tower. The game rewards fast reflexes and the ability to master old tactics like circle-strafing and bunny jumping. Even so it doesn't take much to kill you and an element of dumb luck is essential to get as high up in the tower as possible.

Almost everything in the game is made by Joe Mirabello himself and Tower of Guns is very much the quintessential indie game. It looks incredible with a visual style that lands somewhere between Borderlands and Ratchet & Clank. The music sets the tone well and keeps the pace up. The level design is relatively straightforward with ample room to move around and use the environment to dodge bullets. The tower is divided into rooms and each one supplies a new challenge, with only a moment between each one to catch your breath. The doors are opened by shooting them, just like in real life!

There's little context for what takes place in Tower of Guns, but every time you start a new play-through you're treated to a new twist on what passes for story in the game. Each time some form of narrator asks you to shoot everything in sight and get to the top of the tower. It's hard to explain but it definitely makes the game a lot more fun to play.

Aside from being both fun and challenging, Tower of Guns can also be terribly frustrating. We don't mind games that are repetitive or that force the player to play it several times to unlock new features. What bothers us the most is the lack of forward momentum in the game. You are never told how far up in the tower you got, or how far you had left until the top. When you die there's a statistic of how well you did with information such as your kill count. The thing that is presented in the boldest and most visible font, however, is how many times you've died in Tower of Guns and that doesn't really motivate me to play another ten times to unlock a new perk or gun.

We respect developers who leave large studios to do their own thing, who defy economic difficulties to publish the game of their dreams, the one they want to play but no one else in the game industry wants to make. We tip our hats to Joe Mirabello for what he's accomplished in Tower of Guns, but sadly we won't be playing much of it in the future - torturous difficulties aren't everybody's cup of tea.