I wanted to love Towertale. I like "boss rush" games, and it's obvious that this game was crafted with love. But I cannot force myself to giveI wanted to love Towertale. I like "boss rush" games, and it's obvious that this game was crafted with love. But I cannot force myself to give it more than a 5.
The core problem with the game is mechanical: if all you have are boss fights, then they'd better be good. Unfortunately, the fights in Towertale aren't good enough. I wasn't asking for Hollow Knight-level fights, but at least something that encourages you to rely on pattern matching and situational awareness. Instead, most bosses in Towertale can be beat by finding a repetitive attack pattern that works for one or two stages and applying that pattern again and again until you win. That mechanical shortcoming results in boring, mirthless fights. If the controls in the game were tight, you'd be encouraged to rely more on improvisation–but they feel slow and imprecise, so you end up just going through the motions, for hours and hours. It's a joyless experience. Except for one or two more challenging fights, you rarely get the kind of pump-your-first elation you experience when you beat a boss in games like Cuphead, or Mechstermination Force.
The second main problem with the game is the ridiculously overwritten story. This game pushed me past the point where I clicked in exasperation through the lengthy dialogues, praying they'd end soon. It seems that no character can communicate anything without repeating the same concept four or five times. The effect can become comical: you keep thinking that a dialogue is finally over, and then useless sentences keep appearing, like in one of those stand-up comedy gags.
Not even a great story could sustain such mindless repetition–and Towertale's story is not great. Towards the end, it just drags on and on, inflicting more and more dialogue on you, with an absurdly long stream of false endings that had me facepalm in despair. "Maybe this time it's really over… oh crap, no, it isn't". In retrospect, I wish I'd played the game in Arcade mode, without having to suffer through the story.
The idea of the game is that the story spans multiple playthrough with different characters. However, all the problems in Towertale come together in the last character, when you're already tired of going through the same bosses for the fourth time. "Dark Echo" is, without a doubt, the most annoying character I ever played in a game. Its controls seem designed to confuse you, but eventually you'll get over that. What really dragged down the entire experience was, once again, the dialogue. "Dark Echo"'s long monologues seem copy-pasted from each other, and then there is that cringeworthy laugh line ("BWAHAHAHAHA!") that gets repeated literally hundreds of time. Sometimes half the darn dialogue is made up of "BWAHAHAHAHA!"s. After a while, this character feels insulting, as if the developers were intent on trolling the player. By the end of the game, I hated this character, and I resented the developers for making me read his unsufferable lines.
All in all, Towertale is a well-intentioned game, and it's not terrible–but it does have terrible dialogue. I still had fun in the few good boss fights, and I can see a good game inside Towertale, screaming to get out. I hope that these developers go on to make more games, and hopefully spend less time writing dialogue and more tuning the gameplay. Please folks, just remove four fifths of the lines before you release your next game. I promise that the story will be better for it.
And I beg you, on my knees: I'm willing to pay good money to never read a "BWAHAHAHAHA!" again. Please.…Full Review »