The Deadly Tower of Monsters

The Deadly Tower of Monsters is a well contained and enjoyable experience that plays easily enough, so up front if you think you’ll want to play this game and you can afford it, go for it because the story pay off is really good. Now let me list off some thoughts about its individual aspects if you are still on the fence.

The Deadly Tower of Monsters’ strongest aspect is its visual style, it captures the style of old sci-fi movies. Everything from the characters, to the monsters, to the rocks in the background convey this style of production. Enemies that are even supposed to be claymation have this conveyed through a lower number of frames of animation, which honestly has a super charming look, and the game’s narrator reveals a lot of each monster’s nature, leading to some of the best writing in the game. The sounds are also fitting, the music and voice acting feeling pretty accurate to the era and well produced.

The gameplay is akin to top down action games like Bastion, you have two weapons, a dodge, and some abilities, while the combat isn’t necessarily super stand out it’s smooth enough and the quality of the weapons is entertaining enough I enjoyed it for the duration of the game. Considering the vertical nature of the game’s environment you also have encounters where you are shooting over the edge of tower or even sky diving off the tower to reach unlockables or other scenes, the shooting sequences aren’t much more than shooting galleries but falling off the tower is pretty satisfying and doesn’t impede you because the game gives you multiple tools to quickly teleport back to where you jumped off. There’s an upgrade system which is pretty nonsensical, upgrading the weapons doesn’t exactly always detail the gameplay changes related to upgrading, but you get the basic idea that upgrading it makes it “better” so I never found weapon capabilities harmed for the sake of the jokes.

Speaking of jokes, the writing of the story and dialogue of the characters is pretty well done, but the filler dialogue of the narrator varies from fairly entertaining to just non-humorous. I’ll give it credit that I never found the dialogue annoying aside from one or two flat jokes, and the way it ties in with the story and talks about the game mechanics is pretty smart and really pays off in the end. There’s also some confusion over what era the movie is supposed to be in, visually and qualitative it seems like a late 60’s early 70’s sci-fi flick, but there’s also a lot of talk about silent movies and even some Star Wars references, it doesn’t exactly impede the nature of the game’s storytelling, but it stood out to me, and they get away from it pretty early on the game.

I think in terms of mechanics and design this is definitely Ace Team’s most approachable game, and if you’ve liked the aesthetic and storytelling of Ace Team games but couldn’t get behind the total weirdness of Zeno Clash or mechanics of Rock of Ages, this game is a great entry point and a very satisfying and interesting self contained experience. The overall story alone is worth playing through and takes some great turns that will award your time spent with a very unique experience you won’t forget.