Review: Faulty 'Twisted Tower' Fails to Find the Fun
- Antal Bokor
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
I’ve been playing first person shooters for a long time. I was right there at the birth of the genre, playing some of the very first FPS games on the very first hardware. I’ve played lots of great FPS games, and even more terrible ones. Twisted Tower sits on the lower end of the spectrum, despite having a ton of initial promise.
Twisted Tower is a first person shooter that is based around a 1950s (ish) theme park (er) themed tower. It obviously takes some inspiration from Bioshock (confirmed by a note on their Steam store page) and other 2000’s or earlier first person shooters. It has a diverse roster of enemies, multiple floors full of themed levels to conquer, and a whole arsenal of weapons to shoot. And right when I started it up I had the feeling that I was in for a solidly “okay” first person shooter.
But let’s not kid ourselves.
I have to give some kudos to the character design for the game’s key art. There is something about it that seriously invokes 90s computer game graphics. This continues on into the game’s few cutscenes. They’re delightfully low res to sell a pseudo retro, almost boomer shooter feel.
Similarly, the actual design of the game is pretty great. While the evil mascot schtick is over done in general, it’s not used terribly here. And it fits into the theme better than it does in most other games. While the mascots themselves aren’t particularly terrifying, they (again) invoked a Bioshock sort of Splicer feel. If the mascots roamed around while muttering and yelling at themselves it would have locked it in completely.
The levels themselves are designed well, too. There is enough variation in the design for me to think “wow, this is new” on occasion.
Also, naming a gun “Ms. Fire” is not only brilliant, but when you’re out of ammo, a little flag comes out that says “Bang!”
Delightful. And I mean that. I love that.
Now that I frontloaded most of what I liked about the game, I can talk about what I don’t think worked.
Enemy behavior and placement is all messed up. Most enemies are practically the same with different weapons. The enemy economy is also very strange. Enemy distribution feels completely random in some cases, like the developers were just like “yeah, let’s just throw in a few more guys here.” I’m sure every game does it, but Twisted Tower definitely did it.
There are a few clever enemy placements here and there, but most enemy encounters are uninspired, or enemies come at you in waves after you get locked into a section.
Even the worst shooters can be redeemed by some good weapons. Sadly, there isn’t a gun in Twisted Tower I can say I enjoyed,though I really appreciated the design behind many of the weapons. One weapon is loaded with marbles and is fired via a pinball machine type contraption. Another is a slingshot with a magnifying glass. And there was the previously mentioned Ms. Fire. But these guns aren’t fun to shoot. And it feels like there are too many of them, with too many types of ammo. It’s like the developer made a specific number of guns to fill a quota instead of figuring out what’s actually good.
Twisted Tower is not a very difficult game. Nor is it a very long game. I would not have died once, if it wasn’t for instant death on falling. I managed to complete my entire first playthrough in under four hours. There is an option for a new game plus that offers alternate routes, but the fact is I couldn’t stomach another go at it, even if I was determined to see it through.
Once was enough.
I wish I would have liked Twisted Tower with its strange mix of carnival terror, and random vulgarity. Sadly, even its plot–told in random recordings and other scattered missives–does nothing to help the game. There are lots of clues in the story that don’t really pay off, and the final “twist” ended up being dreadful, and not the scary sort of dread, either. Instead it’s a weird tonally dissonant blending of vulgarity and horror that doesn't land, and makes the entire bad game even worse for it.
There are so many better first person shooters. Go play those. Don’t play this.
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