Review: The Deadly Tower of Monsters
I haven’t seen a game pull off the super cheesy lines inspired by B movies made back in the day since Unstoppable Gorg. That game was a tower defense game, though, with goofy villains and flying saucers. The Deadly Tower of Monsters (TDTM from here on out because golly that’s a long title) pulls it off in spades. The setup is a director coming back to record some audio commentary for the DVD release of the movie he made a while ago. He talks rather passive about things like people dying on the set to the cost of certain features and complaints by stars: it’s all very entertaining.
The whole game is run in a 60’s style of aesthetics with creatures that look like they are stop-motioned captured (love that T-Rex and the squid people). Keep in mind though, that this is the director doing the narrating while you play. If you die, he criticizes the one playing the video footage for getting bad footage since the scene never happened that way in the original film. It was mocking you and still explained it off (if you were worried about continuity and how they would talk about it). I died so much at one point that the one helping with the footage asked the director why they kept all of these reels when they weren’t shot correctly. They really put a lot of thought into the narration and I love how they comment about almost everything.
The combat works fairly well, I did favor the melee over the range attack. It always feels like you do more damage than using the lasers and such. (I’m looking at you Tesla Gun.) Smaller melee weapons are faster and quicker guns are weaker, yadda yadda yadda, I wield the biggest stick and tank with my face! That’s not to say that things will always be that way throughout the course of the entire game. There are cogs of different colors and worth littered throughout the game and you will use these cogs to upgrade your weapons. Obviously there are more difficult ones to get and some that I just don’t understand how to get at this point in the game, but with exploring you’ll find enough of them to fix the weapons up to play the way you want to… or at least start in the direction you’ll want to go in. There is a good variety of different weapons that will get handed to you as you progress, upgrading them will be dependent on your determination to explore and gather the various types of cogs.
You’re given three adventurers to play around with in TDTM, and I used to feel that this was one of the few negatives I had with the game. They all felt like the same character to me. Whether it’s with the combat in general or jumping, there didn’t feel like there was any major difference in how they operated/controlled. If I had to ask myself if that’s a bad thing, I would say not completely. In the fact that they all felt the same, that means I could switch it up between Dick Starspeed, Scarlet Nova and Robot. While I love Robot’s name, for some reason I loved to play with… Mr. Starspeed.
It was about the time that I was getting fed up with some golden cogs that I couldn’t figure out how to get that I realized that specific characters had different talents. The first one to really set itself apart was Robot. He had the ability to slow time down and that opened my eyes to being able to progress further and get some cogs that were impossible before hand. Now, with the other characters starting to show me their moves, it’s starting to feel like the characters are a bit more fleshed out than I had originally thought. Granted, as you obtain new abilities, you slowly remember places that gave you pause and caused your brain to hurt an hour or so back and realize that this game will have some back tracking. I was almost bothered by this until I discovered that all of the characters could fast travel up and down the tower (a power I had originally thought to be given to Scarlet only). This is what I get for assuming.
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