Tower 57

Tower 57 seemed to fulfill the promise that The Chaos Engine made in the early 90s: a topdown shooter with an interesting story in a steampunk universe. And indeed, in contrast to Chaos Engine, Tower 57 is actually fun to play. The levels are more interesting with a working in-game map, there actually is a story, the controls work great, there are savepoints, what could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot. There are dozens of smaller and bigger design flaws where the biggest one is that the character switching doesn't make sense. Switching characters drains your "special meter" that is needed for special attacks and that can be only refilled by either killing enemies of finding a blue rob. Now that actually means that you don't want to switch characters since you usually can't switch back in the near future and additionally your special meter is drained which you might need for a boss fight or other critical situation. On top, it's kinda impossible to level up all three characters, so the whole idea of character switching is just not working. Furthermore, even in the very first level, two doors can only be opened with the hacking tool which is not explained at all at this point. Now this would still be fine if you could carry more than one tool or swap tools with your other characters but the game won't allow that. So you need to sacrifice a beneficial tool like slowing time for the hacking tool which is somewhat useless for anything but opening doors. Besides, the hacking minigame is a cheap ripoff of the Paradroid minigame used to take over other droids. Then there's a free roaming/hub area called "Armor's den" which would be OK, if there was actually something relevant to do there. But it's just for badly done minigames and starting the next level. You can neither go back to visit previous levels nor have any relevant conversations or whatever. I needed ~10h to reach the disappointing end. So yeah, it's not bad but would need lots of polish to be great.

The game was fun to play, especially the first levels. It was challenging, manageable, and had fun elements. Not so fun: 1) The game has secrets, but often stops you from backtracking to find them in later levels, which made it frustrating for someone who likes to find them as me. 2) The game autosaves after finishing a level, so when you accidentally walk there, you cannot load your older save anymore, cause that is overwritten. 3) The ending sucks and makes not much sense. The last level managed to make an interesting contribution, and then - nothing out of it, cut short and sucky. 4) Sometimes the game needs the "Enter" key, even though it isn't mentioned or shown. All in all, funny, worth it, but with downsides.

If you like Hotline Miami 1 and 2 my guess is, you will also enjoy this. The game is good, the story is not bad and the game can give you a challenge. I had no issues playing the game. Can recommend.

This is the best hybrid Strategy/Action/Shooter/Arcade=ish I've played in a long time. It is such a creative masterpiece. It offers fun, challenge, unigue gameplay, good music, intuitive controls as well as a bit of humor and quirkiness. I do not understand the complaints; it is one of the best games I've played in a long, long time.

Overall Tower 57 hits some sweet spots like art direction, but stumbles badly in other critical game design areas and suffers from a lack luster ending. Right from the outset Tower 57 looks good and plays well, but the longer you engage the game the more clear it becomes the title was either insufficiently play tested or rushed to release. At the start of any game you choose three of six characters which function as your three 'lives'. Each player has their own stats and unique set of weapons. These weapons can then be replaced as you find more, and further upgraded many times to let you really bring the pain. However this is where the good design stops. All the weapons you collect, along with the expensive upgrades you buy, can be lost when a character dies. If you want to hold onto those upgraded weapons you must pick them up with your next character or "life", but this can lead to being forced to discard other upgraded weapons your next character spawns with. The next thing Tower 57 has an issue with is the lives or retrys you're allowed. When any character dies it's possible to resurrect them with a special amber orb, of which there are few, but you can only use them at a resurrection point. However the game's level design discourages and often locks you out from fully exploring levels and finding these items. Frequently a level has multiple routes to get to the same location and upon choosing one, the others lock and become inaccessible. This means there's no guarantee you'll stumble down a path with a hidden orb or other valuable collectable. If that's not bad enough the game also has a habit of auto saving with no notice, making it common to be locked into a boss fight or start a level with only a fraction of health left and no ability to go back for a do-over or restart the level. There's also the series of glitches and ways to get stuck on terrain leading to sudden death which, for reasons already explained, are difficult to recover from. In the end Tower 57 has a lot of instant likeable charm from it's art direction, good pixel animation, and sound design. However, with a weak unrewarding story and the number of both technical and intrinsic design problems it just falls short. It's an alright game, just not one you want to pay full price for.