Quick Review: Tower of Guns

That’s a lotta guns.

Lotta guns, and now a lotta enemies.

Developed by Terrible Posture Games, published by Versus Evil and released on March 4th, 2014, Tower of Guns is an attempt at combining three genres: First-person shooter, Roguelike, and shmup (sort of, for that last one). Its story is fairly simple: A mysterious tower filled with robots and weapons appeared out of nowhere in the middle of a village. What happens next in the plot? Doesn’t really matter, it’s randomized. What matters is that you must try to reach the top of the tower.

The game plays like a roguelike: You destroy enemies, finish the rooms, and collect upgrades to your stats. At the end of a level, you fight a boss, then move on to the next level. Before starting a run, you pick a weapon among those unlocked, then you can choose a perk that changes some details about the character. The first perk available allows you to jump in midair twice, the other cancels fall damage. You will see new rooms on each playthrough, per the randomized nature of roguelikes. The game keeps track of your number of deaths, upgrades collected, items found across playthroughs, and so on. On a playthrough, you can find coins to unlock new items; collect red orbs to replenish your health; blue orbs that counts as EXP for your gun, which increases in power as it levels up (getting hit will decrease its EXP, however); and so on.

Kill the turrets, too! Yeah, you can do that,
they're destructible.

The difference is that, unlike a lot of roguelikes, you play in first person, aiming at enemies and shooting to kill them. The shmup part comes from the sheer number of enemies that can attack at once. Several of those enemies are turrets that you can destroy as well. The boss at the end of each level even has a health bar! Unlike a regular roguelike, this game is split into proper levels instead of having a continuous world to explore (thus limiting exploration a bit), but the feel is close enough.

I’ll give it that, the game tries to have a lot of variety in weapons and settings – since any combo of gun + perk is possible, all sorts of crazy setups can be achieved. Notably, it includes a handful of weapons with very peculiar effects, such as one that gets weaker the higher in level it gets. One issue, however, may be that as your character’s stats increase, they may become difficult to control – with a speed too high far into the game, as an example.

This thing is quite literally trying to crash into me!

Okay, it looks like I might have a chance against
this one boss...

I personally can’t say I was wowed by what I experienced, but I can see why it’d be addictive for some. Randomization, a large choice of starting combinations, and a lot of secrets to discover – that’s the formula that helps make roguelikes so popular and replayable. I’ve tried a few (Quest of Dungeons in this set of Quick Reviews, I also spent a few hours playing The Binding of Isaac), and I can safely say I felt more at ease with the usual bird’s eye view than in first person. Doesn’t make the game any easier, but it’s simpler to deal with threats coming from all sides in bird’s eye view. I at least appreciate the attempt at putting that spin on the genre. As I’ve learned during writing, first-person roguelikes aren’t common but there’s still quite a few out there.

Okay, this is a bit intense even by FPS standards.

The other issue with roguelikes is that you need to spend a lot of time playing one to really have a good feel of the entire game. In spite of that, I’ve seen the wide variety of options before starting a run, including guns that are mechanically different. The “plot”, also randomized at every run, tends to be pretty silly. Several rooms and enemies are creative, and per the genre, you’ll see new places, enemies and bosses on every run.

I don’t really have a bad opinion of it, though I don’t know if I’ll play more – although it’s fun, it didn’t do a lot to stick out in my mind, and the high number of enemies coupled with my lack of skill in first-person made this game pretty tough for me to play. Still, if that combination intrigues you, do give it a look.

Tower of Guns is available on Steam for 14.99$ USD, currently on sale with 70% off at 4.99$.

Also note that, due to the late release of this review, there won't be a review on Friday; instead, the last two reviews of this set will be posted next week.