Tower of Guns

 PC
User Score
7.2

Mixed or average reviews- based on 45 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 28 out of 45
  2. Mixed: 9 out of 45
  3. Negative: 8 out of 45

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  1. Tirah
    Apr 11, 2015
    8
    A simple yet enjoyable game. You run around in randomly generated levels and kill robots. That's all there is to it. If you prefer your game to have a bit of depth, ToG will be a disappointment.
    If all you want is some mindless fun, however, this game will be right up your alley.
    I usually hate playing FPS's on consoles because controlers are nowhere near as precise as a mouse and a    A simple yet enjoyable game. You run around in randomly generated levels and kill robots. That's all there is to it. If you prefer your game to have a bit of depth, ToG will be a disappointment.
    If all you want is some mindless fun, however, this game will be right up your alley.
    I usually hate playing FPS's on consoles because controlers are nowhere near as precise as a mouse and a keyboard, but ToG on PS4 was a pleasant surprise. Targeting is perfectly smooth, jump controls are floaty and feel strange at first, but you get used to it fast. ToG lacks multiplayer, so if that's what you expect from your FPS, move along.
    Overall, the game is fun. It's simple, fairly challenging but never to the point of frustration, and secrets, unlockables and randomly generated levels keep an otherwise short game interesting long after you've beaten it.    … Expand
  2. cheesum
    Sep 24, 2014
    10
    Tower of guns is a very enjoyable rogue like fps.

    It features very fast and frantic gameplay with a very rewarding number of powerups and weapons to unlock and play through the game with. The gameplay is highly varied and boasts some of the better developed roguelike concepts that I have seen
  3. Ryukaki
    Mar 6, 2014
    8
    Tower of Guns is a promising first-person-roguelike which has been stuffed full of the charm and attitude you would expect from a developer if you grew up loving games like Serious Sam.

    Full of enjoyable easter-eggs, secret locations, and zany power-ups, ToG puts you right into the action and provides just enough curve-balls while you progress to keep you on your toes. The single    Tower of Guns is a promising first-person-roguelike which has been stuffed full of the charm and attitude you would expect from a developer if you grew up loving games like Serious Sam.

    Full of enjoyable easter-eggs, secret locations, and zany power-ups, ToG puts you right into the action and provides just enough curve-balls while you progress to keep you on your toes.

    The single developer of the game has gone out of his way to add a lot of flavour and personality to his game, without forgetting the core of why you come to an FPS: Shoot stuff. And do you get to shoot stuff. From the very beginning you are facing down ever-increasing swarms of robotic enemies, environmental hazards, spikes, sawblades, lava, and larger-than-life enemies who are all determined to kill you at any cost. Along the way, there are a multitude of power-ups, which can do anything from increasing your health, or allowing you to jump an extra time (Or a seventh, or eighth time..), to making your weapon's bullets into mines, or home in on enemies.

    While the AI is rudimentary and simple, and enemy variety isn't terribly huge, the bosses are interesting, and the level design and vast number of secrets are reminiscent of old favorites, like Doom or Serious Sam. The iteration time on runs is very quick, and the developer has done a good job of getting you back into the game right after you've died, making it so that any single loss never feels heartbreaking, and you don't feel like you're set back too far to just try one more time.

    One of the biggest weaknesses of the game comes in that the level variety is quite small, and after playing through the game four or five times, the only challenge lies in greatly increasing difficulty (Damage from enemies, increased enemy count, harder enemy types.) and the geography becomes quick to memorize. This memorization turns into a positive, however, as you begin to explore new avenues of moving around a level, and further engagements in that terrain become more and more familiar until you're leaping across vast chasms and over huge thresher-filled spike-pits without ever looking away from the horde of spike-bots that are chasing you down.

    Hunting the secrets in the game is an enjoyable exercise, and often times when you discover a new one, you feel that the solution was very clear, in retrospect. This indicates solid puzzle design, and iteration on the way the secrets were made. They're not obvious at first, but you never feel cheated, or as though they were unfairly hidden. Instead, you feel clever for having lined up your cunning with that of the designer's.

    The level design focuses much more on spaces that are interesting an exciting to use, rather than the photo-realistic environments that we're used to from other FPS games, and this works incredibly well; you feel creative and skillful when you make that triple-jump across a gap full of enemies and rain death down on their heads with your saw-launcher, to land on the far side behind some cannons and blow them apart. You feel sneaky and agile when you launch yourself to the top of a massive open room with acceleration cubes and stick the landing on top of a massive column in the center of the room, to be greeted by "Secret Found!".

    There are a number of small bugs, and a few big bugs, that show that this game was indeed made by just one person, but the issues that come up, even when they ruin your whole run, never feel like they've ruined your game session. Items can get caught on unkempt geometry and remain out of reach, you can get nicked by slightly overzealous damage volumes, but all in all, any single run is unlikely to be more than grazed by any specific bug.

    Tower of Guns is a fun game. It's a rare gem in a sea of whitewash; uniquely challenging, inspired, and one of the most enjoyable experiences that I've had in at least the last six months. It wraps up everything good about the golden age of FPS games, bundles them in the accessibility and randomness of a roguelike, and gives an experience that people new to any one part of its genres will love, while retaining just enough of its core values to keep even the most hardened player enjoying themselves. I sincerely wish we could get more games like this one; simple, fun, deep, and made with love.    … Expand
  4. EricNeo
    Mar 12, 2014
    8
    A fairly hard fps rogue-like, very enjoyable and quite impressive for a one man dev project.

    Only negatives I have about the game at the moment is no multiplayer and the collections don't tell you what they do. Joe the dev is active on his forum and interacting with the community which is nice to see, and the humor also reminds me of portal. I expected an indie fps rogue-like and    A fairly hard fps rogue-like, very enjoyable and quite impressive for a one man dev project.

    Only negatives I have about the game at the moment is no multiplayer and the collections don't tell you what they do.

    Joe the dev is active on his forum and interacting with the community which is nice to see, and the humor also reminds me of portal.

    I expected an indie fps rogue-like and I got one, I'd be interested to see what kind of game Joe makes next.

    Now you didn't see me hunt these hug-bots for loot.    … Expand
  5. c3p
    Mar 28, 2014
    7
    If you like both oldschool fps (think quake) and roquelike games, than you definetly should check this out. Everyone else: watch a let's play, you really see all there is in there.
    Personally i think movement is nice, but i don't dig the roquelike aspect. So i stoped playing after 5 death ~1:30hour
  6. pkarapan77
    Apr 11, 2015
    4
    Gameplay would give it a 9 except for the following glaring problems:
    1. no multiplayer
    2. controls way too blocky
    3. why do you have to start out with such a crappy gun... give us something decent to play with
  7. Captain_Chaos
    Jun 22, 2016
    8
    So you like FPSs, right? Of course you do. How about roguelikes, hmm? Yeah, I thought so. Well, Tower of Guns is both. For reasons randomly generated at the beginning of a run, a person, with a gun, and a perk, must climb a deadly tower full of traps, turrets and ill-tempered robots. You only get two guns and perks to begin with, but unlock more as you play. You even get a shotgun forSo you like FPSs, right? Of course you do. How about roguelikes, hmm? Yeah, I thought so. Well, Tower of Guns is both. For reasons randomly generated at the beginning of a run, a person, with a gun, and a perk, must climb a deadly tower full of traps, turrets and ill-tempered robots. You only get two guns and perks to begin with, but unlock more as you play. You even get a shotgun for dying enough times. In true roguelike fashion, just about everything is randomized- which rooms you'll enter, which enemies will be there and what stats they'll have, what they'll drop and so on. The success of a run depends largely on two simple factors- your own talent for classic run-and-gun FPSs, and as always: not whether or not the random number god hates you, but exactly how much he does. The game's presentation is simplistic but effective, with good music and effective directional sound, making it a simple matter to determine what's about to ♥♥♥♥ up your run. Tower of Guns makes for a good lunchbreak game and like any good roguelike, it's as addicting as it needs to be.… Expand
  8. TitaniumDragon
    Dec 11, 2015
    5
    Tower of Guns is a roguelike FPS. You spawn in the first of five levels in the titular Tower of Guns, and must fight your way through it until you reach the top – and victory. Along the way, you will fight numerous automated gun turrets – both fixed and floating – along with various other mechanical enemies which will attack you in hopes of killing you and forcing you to start over. EveryTower of Guns is a roguelike FPS. You spawn in the first of five levels in the titular Tower of Guns, and must fight your way through it until you reach the top – and victory. Along the way, you will fight numerous automated gun turrets – both fixed and floating – along with various other mechanical enemies which will attack you in hopes of killing you and forcing you to start over. Every level ends with a boss fight in some sort of arena, with a variety of bosses (and indeed, of possible levels) trying to keep things fresh.

    That being said, this game is not actually that diverse in terms of gameplay. You only play through five levels (or six, if you go on to fight the optional final boss) in any particular playthrough. The levels are quite short, and can be beaten in just a few minutes, though you might spend 10+ minutes trying to find all the secrets in them (to no success; this is nearly impossible to do). You upgrade yourself by finding various random pickups, as well as collecting coins and using them on random vending machines which contain said pickups. Rarely, you will find a new gun. Enemies drop health (for healing) as well as xp (for levelling up your gun to shoot better shots and deal more damage).

    But while all of this is well and good, and you can start the game with your choice of a weapon and a powerup (and unlock more of these by doing various tasks in-game), the sad reality is that there just isn’t that much to this game. The enemies end up being very samey after a while, and the room layouts become very familiar. The secrets are kind of obnoxious to find – some of them can only be found if you have the right items/pickups, which are random, while others are actually hidden behind invisible walls which give no hint to their existence. As the secrets are the primary gameplay extender here, and they’re kind of lame in many cases, this kind of hurts the game’s replayability even more than it already was, and a lot of the time you spend in-game is spent hunting for the secrets rather than fighting. If you just fight your way through the levels, most can be beaten quite easily within five minutes, and indeed, there are unlocks for doing so.

    The game isn’t very difficult either; after my first three playthroughs ended at the first boss, I nearly beat the game on my next two playthroughs, and then successfully did so on my sixth, only four hours into the game, at which point the game held little new for me. Sure, there were various secrets that I hadn’t found, but what’s the point in hunting those out when so many of them are arbitrary? Moreover, what’s the point when you have already beaten the game – what challenge is there left for you? Is endless mode really that much of an attraction?

    The answer to all this is “not so much”, meaning that this is more or less a game that you’ll play for an afternoon, beat, and unless you’re a hyper completionist, never bother with again. While the alternate text at the start of every level giving a bit of randomized backstory to why you are in the tower is mildly clever, it was simply not amusing enough to make me want to keep playing the game over and over again until I saw them all.

    The game isn’t bad, and running through it until you beat it is decent enough, but it is very lightweight and doesn’t really have a whole lot to really recommend it. It is adequate, but is mere adequacy what you really want?    … Expand

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
76

Generally favorable reviews - based on 16 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 11 out of 16
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 16
  3. Negative: 0 out of 16
  1. GameSpot
    Apr 24, 2015
    80
    Complaints aside, Tower of Guns delivers an engaging experience that is well suited to short bursts of play in its standard form or long marathons in its ranked endless mode. The game offers no shortage of fun. So grab your gun--it's time to go to bullet hell.
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  2. Gamer.nl
    Apr 24, 2015
    50
    Tower of Guns takes a lot of elements from other roguelikes, but it has not depth and no feeling of unpredictability. This makes Tower of Guns only fun for a few times, but after that, there is not much fun left to get out of it.
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  3. 3DJuegos
    Apr 13, 2015
    70
    It may not be the best roguelike we ever played, but it helps that it’s virtually unique in its genre, mixing permanent death with the first person shooter.
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