Tower of Guns is a beautiful marriage of two of my favorite genres, the first-person shooter and the roguelike. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my run I paused to finish this review.
Tower of Guns offers a fresh and exciting blast of satisfying thrills with each play-through, all delivered in easily digestible, rogue-like chunks. That this is essentially the work of just one guy, and that the price is right (currently £11.99 on Steam), makes Tower of Guns easy to recommend to PC gamers looking for something just a little bit different.
Tower of guns is a very enjoyable rogue like fps.
It features very fast and frantic gameplay with a very rewarding number of powerups and weapons to unlock and play through the game with. The gameplay is highly varied and boasts some of the better developed roguelike concepts that I have seen
So you like FPSs, right? Of course you do. How about roguelikes, hmm? Yeah, I thought so. Well, Tower of Guns is both. For reasons randomly generated at the beginning of a run, a person, with a gun, and a perk, must climb a deadly tower full of traps, turrets and ill-tempered robots. You only get two guns and perks to begin with, but unlock more as you play. You even get a shotgun for dying enough times. In true roguelike fashion, just about everything is randomized- which rooms you'll enter, which enemies will be there and what stats they'll have, what they'll drop and so on. The success of a run depends largely on two simple factors- your own talent for classic run-and-gun FPSs, and as always: not whether or not the random number god hates you, but exactly how much he does. The game's presentation is simplistic but effective, with good music and effective directional sound, making it a simple matter to determine what's about to up your run. Tower of Guns makes for a good lunchbreak game and like any good roguelike, it's as addicting as it needs to be.
Not everyone will like the graphics, the absence of a classical narrative, the level design, and many kind of enemies, but if you are looking for a shooter a little different than usual, think about getting it.
Even though it never gives you an adequate feeling of when and from where you are taking damage, you'll end up playing this over and over again. It's a refreshingly undiluted experience.
Tower of Guns takes a lot of elements from other roguelikes, but it has not depth and no feeling of unpredictability. This makes Tower of Guns only fun for a few times, but after that, there is not much fun left to get out of it.
A simple yet enjoyable game. You run around in randomly generated levels and kill robots. That's all there is to it. If you prefer your game to have a bit of depth, ToG will be a disappointment.
If all you want is some mindless fun, however, this game will be right up your alley.
I usually hate playing FPS's on consoles because controlers are nowhere near as precise as a mouse and a keyboard, but ToG on PS4 was a pleasant surprise. Targeting is perfectly smooth, jump controls are floaty and feel strange at first, but you get used to it fast. ToG lacks multiplayer, so if that's what you expect from your FPS, move along.
Overall, the game is fun. It's simple, fairly challenging but never to the point of frustration, and secrets, unlockables and randomly generated levels keep an otherwise short game interesting long after you've beaten it.
A fairly hard fps rogue-like, very enjoyable and quite impressive for a one man dev project.
Only negatives I have about the game at the moment is no multiplayer and the collections don't tell you what they do.
Joe the dev is active on his forum and interacting with the community which is nice to see, and the humor also reminds me of portal.
I expected an indie fps rogue-like and I got one, I'd be interested to see what kind of game Joe makes next.
Now you didn't see me hunt these hug-bots for loot.
If you like both oldschool fps (think quake) and roquelike games, than you definetly should check this out. Everyone else: watch a let's play, you really see all there is in there.
Personally i think movement is nice, but i don't dig the roquelike aspect. So i stoped playing after 5 death ~1:30hour
Tower of Guns is a roguelike FPS. You spawn in the first of five levels in the titular Tower of Guns, and must fight your way through it until you reach the top – and victory. Along the way, you will fight numerous automated gun turrets – both fixed and floating – along with various other mechanical enemies which will attack you in hopes of killing you and forcing you to start over. Every level ends with a boss fight in some sort of arena, with a variety of bosses (and indeed, of possible levels) trying to keep things fresh.
That being said, this game is not actually that diverse in terms of gameplay. You only play through five levels (or six, if you go on to fight the optional final boss) in any particular playthrough. The levels are quite short, and can be beaten in just a few minutes, though you might spend 10+ minutes trying to find all the secrets in them (to no success; this is nearly impossible to do). You upgrade yourself by finding various random pickups, as well as collecting coins and using them on random vending machines which contain said pickups. Rarely, you will find a new gun. Enemies drop health (for healing) as well as xp (for levelling up your gun to shoot better shots and deal more damage).
But while all of this is well and good, and you can start the game with your choice of a weapon and a powerup (and unlock more of these by doing various tasks in-game), the sad reality is that there just isn’t that much to this game. The enemies end up being very samey after a while, and the room layouts become very familiar. The secrets are kind of obnoxious to find – some of them can only be found if you have the right items/pickups, which are random, while others are actually hidden behind invisible walls which give no hint to their existence. As the secrets are the primary gameplay extender here, and they’re kind of lame in many cases, this kind of hurts the game’s replayability even more than it already was, and a lot of the time you spend in-game is spent hunting for the secrets rather than fighting. If you just fight your way through the levels, most can be beaten quite easily within five minutes, and indeed, there are unlocks for doing so.
The game isn’t very difficult either; after my first three playthroughs ended at the first boss, I nearly beat the game on my next two playthroughs, and then successfully did so on my sixth, only four hours into the game, at which point the game held little new for me. Sure, there were various secrets that I hadn’t found, but what’s the point in hunting those out when so many of them are arbitrary? Moreover, what’s the point when you have already beaten the game – what challenge is there left for you? Is endless mode really that much of an attraction?
The answer to all this is “not so much”, meaning that this is more or less a game that you’ll play for an afternoon, beat, and unless you’re a hyper completionist, never bother with again. While the alternate text at the start of every level giving a bit of randomized backstory to why you are in the tower is mildly clever, it was simply not amusing enough to make me want to keep playing the game over and over again until I saw them all.
The game isn’t bad, and running through it until you beat it is decent enough, but it is very lightweight and doesn’t really have a whole lot to really recommend it. It is adequate, but is mere adequacy what you really want?
Gameplay would give it a 9 except for the following glaring problems:
1. no multiplayer
2. controls way too blocky
3. why do you have to start out with such a crappy gun... give us something decent to play with
SummaryTower of Guns is a fast paced first-person-shooter for the twitch gamer... with a few randomized elements to keep it fresh with each playthrough.