Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; a guy’s significant other is randomly kidnapped by a maniacal villain and he sets out to rescue her. It’s a heavily familiar setup, albeit one with a couple of highly familiar twists to bolster it. Twisted Tower’s art direction is overly reminiscent of Bioshock too, but strong level design alongside an above-board presentation and entertaining gameplay make it worth playing despite the cliches.
Vincent’s fiancee Charlotte has been abducted by the has-been filmmaker V.C. Twister, so Vincent climbs Twister’s Twisted Tower to save her. Along the way he’ll fight through the amusement park’s mascots while finding tickets that let him advance higher and higher to find the damsel and villain at the top. The game oozes its 1940s aesthetic all the while.
Everything is set up like a boomer shooter complete with a mostly standard assortment of guns (pistol, single and double-barreled shotgun, a couple of machine guns, a magnum, etc), all while tracking down different keys to progress. Vincent also grants new abilities akin to a Metroidvania to reach new areas, such as an air dash and grapple.
That isn’t to say that the game’s a Metroidvania, though. It’s completely linear and briskly paced, coming in at about 5 hours. There are plenty of secrets to find too in the form of ammo, tickets, and food items. You can hold 10 of these at a time, with tickets acting as your currency, which you’ll use to upgrade all of your guns.
Gun upgrades come in the form of buying alt fires, damage increases, clip expansions, and reload speed. Granted, the game’s enemy waves are almost never particularly intense, so it’s unlikely that you’ll find yourself particularly pressured much of the time on the normal difficulty. I mostly do like the gameplay here despite this, I just wish there were more reasons to really use the mechanics to their potential.
Vincent can slide by crouching during a sprint, which is useful for covering ground and evading enemy attacks, but I didn’t feel like I typically needed to truly be on the move to stay alive usually. The guns feel decent to shoot and the enemy types are clearly differentiated (each type is a different mascot whose masks can even be picked up after dispatching them).
Upon beating the game, you can start a new run with your weapons returned to you early on, plus you can keep all of your weapon upgrades (but not your abilities). I was hoping that this would feature altered enemy arrangements but they sadly seemed to be identical. The game told me that certain doors that were locked before would open, but I didn’t find this to be the case, so I’m unsure if I misunderstood something.
Verdict
I enjoyed my time with this Twisted Tower. The level design is a blast, and despite how formulaic the story is, it’s presented quite well, with some surprisingly good voice acting. If you’re in the market for a shortish shooter where you’re fighting mascots in a theme park, then Twisted Tower is easy to recommend, as it does most of what it sets out to do quite well.
