Tower 57

Overall a nice experience, yet suffering from inconsistent design choices and a major bug. -First of all the game breaking bug: "SINKS" yes, sinks. When demolishing a sink with a chainsaw you can get stuck between the broken sink and a wall. If you do not have an aoe weapon to kill yourself you will have to restart the level. (Sinks can be found in the 2nd dungeon) -Inconsistent design: While offering an astonishing level of destructible items, ranging from (deadly) sinks, pipes and even walls, requiring different weapons like explosives for the latter, barriers made from satin rope are utterly indestructible. Inconsistencies can also be found in the art. On the one hand walls have several levels of destruction showing you just how far they are broken and body modifications have individual sprites, yet your melee attack consists of a 1-Frame "animation" leaving your characters on one foot while kicking, able to slide through the level in a very awkward manner. Idle animations are nowhere to be found as well making the game lack the extra bit of love and attention we were used from our SNES classics. Sound design is a matter of personal taste. Whilst overall serviceable I could not shake the feeling that within the hub area the game would accidentally play several tracks overlapping when traveling between shops. Some of the controls also made you wonder. While gameplay itself works great using keyboard it makes little sense having to use arrow keys in shops, instead of WASD to switch between items. Selecting items within shops or newsstands could also have been done with the "use key" (default F) instead of "Enter". It was still a fun experience.

The superb blend of Zombies Ate My Neighbors (SNES) + The Chaos Engine (AMIGA) + Skeleton Crew (GENESIS)! If you like this games, than you need Tower 57 right now. This is the whole pack for you plus some fantastic "modern" features that mix up with this title to the perfection without scratching the retro feel. Go for it!

It took me 5 hours to finish the game. The gameplay is fun. The art style and music are very well done, but I was quite disappointed by the length (and the ending wasn't rewarding, neither the boss fight nor the story). There aren't enough different enemies, fights become very repetitive. Some core mechanics don't make sense: you have to choose 3 characters, but they never interact, and NPCs do not treat you as a group. By chance I've found one NPC (the supervisor) where dialog options differ between characters. This mechanic isn't explained anywhere. Other than that, having 3 characters is essentially a way to give you 3 lives and a slightly wider arsenal. In practice you don't want any of them to die; the penalty is harsh and it may be better to restart the level. Resurrection costs you one very rare golden ball (I found 3 in the entire game), and the dead character's weapons often cannot be fully recovered by the others because their inventory is full. Losing a weapon is painful, since you lose all the expensive upgrades as well. You can carry only 2 weapons, and whenever you find a new weapon you must leave another behind. If you're unlucky, you'll run into an auto-save point shortly after and may not be able to change your decision. A weapon stash is missing! The game doesn't encourage exploration. Some doors permanently close behind you, and there's no hint that this is about to happen. There are no dead ends, simply different ways to reach the level exit, but as far as I could see not different enough to warrant multiple playthroughs. There are a number of mistranslations in the German version and some parts (hacking tutorial) were forgotten and appear in English. The voice overs have not been localized, although there are so few that they become repetitive and annoying fast. Summary: I did have fun, but there's not enough content and the game mechanics falls short on too many points to be considered great. Recommended if you don't mind these issues.

A real retro top down shooter, with combat that feels great, that gives you a great sense of accomplishment. As good Enter the Gungeon and Nuclear throne are, they often get boring and feel too inconsequential, Tower 57 corrects this issue for me. A great mix between stuff like The Chaos Engine, Shock Trooper and Diablo 2, with 2 players same screen multiplayer. Get it if you are looking for something like this!