An old-fashioned FPS meets modern day in this mash-up of the genre.
Tower of Guns is a FPS that handles like Doom with a Borderlands anime-look, while creating randomly generated rooms and enemies to inhabit them each time you play. It’s an interesting idea as each time you play; it’ll have a different layout and strategy to overcome. You also collect upgrades as you go, making you have more health and increase the damage of your weapon. You only get one life though, no checkpoints here. Once you die, it’s back to the start.
The game can be quite unbalanced and relentless in its difficulty. Sometimes you’ll die in the first room if you aren’t careful while others you can make it to the final boss and still kick the bucket, as I have. There is an Endless Mode which just keeps throwing harder and harder rooms at you to overcome, which is incredibly challenging.
The more times you play, you’ll unlock better weapons to use on your runs. My first few were poor, but then I unlocked a shotgun that took me all the way to the final boss on the main mode. It’s a shame there’s no co-op or multiplayer, but co-op is more of a shame as the game feels like it’s meant to be played with more than one person, but you’re all alone instead.
The enemies are a mixture of turrets that hurl bombs and rockets, floating and spinning enemies with spikes and plenty of others. Each area has a main boss at the end and they each have a unique strategy to overcome, as well as having silly names like Dr Turret. My main complaint with Tower of Guns is its replay value, some will be quite addicted and play it for a long time, while others will play once or twice and then probably not pick it up again for weeks.
I think the problem is that even though the rooms are randomly generated, it does become predictable and repetitive after a while. It’s also not the prettiest FPS on the Xbox One; I’m sure it looks better on a high-end PC but would have liked the console version to look better than what we got here. The framerate holds up for the majority of the time though, which is always a plus.
The Verdict
Tower of Guns is a neat idea and actually a fun game to play. However, it does run out of steam quickly and with no co-op or multiplayer to speak of, I can’t see it having lasting appeal among today’s FPS players.
