Tower of Guns showed up on a deals website called "Chrono.GG", which prompted me to try the site out due to positive reviews on reddit's Game Deals section of both the site and game where they compared it to Zigguart. $2.50 USABUX later and... Well, life happened and I had to delay playing for a week...

A week later and I can say the Chrono's site is really slick, but unfortunately I really didn't like the game.

Which is a shame, because I really, really wanted to like this one. In the end I'm just not finding any joy in the game and I'm at the point of uninstalling and moving on. So let's take a look at how it plays, and what I feel is wrong.

Tower of Guns is an indie game running on the Unreal Engine by Joe Mirabello. It's a First Person Roguelite Bullet Hell game, where half your enemies are stationary, and the rest are flying shitbags.

Pick from several different weapons, choose a perk and you're off in the game. There's some randomness for the 'story' too, though I never got far enough to see how well it developed. It pops up at the start of each level with text and pictures of characters talking.

This is the first stage where things start to fall apart. Each level has a 'par' time, and while there appears no penalty for going over par, it will encourage you to get moving right away. The starting room only has a few coins and nearly harmless enemies running around, but it is possible to get past these and into the first combat room before all the text has finished.

Want to get moving and not have the text in your way? Tough! Want to read it? Just know that the timer is counting.

There does appear to be an attempt to bring humour into it, but there's no appeal to the characters due to the way it is displayed and the random nature and lack of time does not help to get attached to any of them.

The basic idea is to move through rooms to get to the end. You'll encounter various enemies and lots of loot along the way.

On death enemies drop RED pellets which increase your health, and blue pellets which increase your gun's power. Occasionally there are also larger health-packs, which you are going to need. Get enough power in the gun and it will become more powerful. This works both ways as getting damaged can decrease the gun power, and even cause it to lose a power level.

Along with this they drop various coins. You can use these to unlock storage pods that have boosts for you the player and for your gun. They're all fairly standard: More health. Faster Walk. Bigger Bullets. If you're familiar with this genre you should pick it up fast.

Levels have some procedural nature to them and the variety of rooms you can get are nicely varied. Except, well I have issues with these as well. (For the first 3 levels I could make it through).

There's a mix of small closeted rooms and W-I-D-E O-P-E-N areas with far too much space to them. If there is an enemy turret at the other end, it will shoot at you. This does give you enough space to avoid the incoming bullets as the big turrets move and shoot slowly, but the distance also includes height where turrets can not only shoot, but drop respawning giant spiked balls onto you.

This might be alright if the rest of the game pace was slower as well. But with the bullets and spikes the difficulty comes from frustration rather than an actual challenge where you can see the skill path required to get past them.

The other enemy type are flying mobs. They come in the large and slow variety which are somewhat manageable, and the fast and small variety. The second type just made me groan whenever I would enter a room as they're just too different from the rest of the game's style of play.

Bosses are basically gigantic enemies that shoot lasers, bullets, bombs, spikes, mines, and possibly other things to kill you. There's more variety to them than the normal enemies, but they're just not 'fun' to play against.

Combine all of this together and you can enter a room and have your health zapped to 25% in seconds when the turrets and flyers spawn in and attack en masse before you have a chance to hide or retaliate.

Visually it looks rather awful. Not directly from the artistic style, but due to a mesh of different styles used.

Rooms are all textured to have a mechanical look asit all comes off as a dull green, brown or red. Fog levels also get in the way of playing on some rooms. I had the settings turned up to max and the game just looks muddy. Sometimes you get some stronger blues or reds in the levels, but you should expect the rest to be faded and rather uninspiring.

Menus and the conversations use a pseudo pencil coloured drawing look. I don't mind it that much, but it is really just too jarring with the rest of the game.

Again, it is a clash of different styles that really detract from this title. If the dev team stuck with just one type, I'd be far more accepting of it. Alas... It is just too painful to sit through

Musically... I like the music, it has got a nice groove and ambience to it, and yet...
...I guess it is not what I was expecting from a game called "Tower of Guns". There's precious few moments where the soundtrack really gets pumping or fits in with the combat style you have to go for to complete a room. On its own it is quite good. In game? not so much.
You can listen to it over on Bandcamp and chuck the musician(s) $5 USD for the album. And to make me feel worse, listening to it there I find it does sound more upbeat than what I heard in game.

My final opinion? Give it a wide pass.

I honestly wanted to enjoy this one. I had few expectations aside from seeing positive reviews and recommendations based on related games. I like the genres used. And I really want to support First Game attempts when the amount of love and effort that has gone into them can easily be seen.

Unfortunately, I really can't recommend this one. Which is a shame, as I like what it tried to do but could not provide for me.

Game Acquisition: Purchased on sale (Chrono.GG)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Thread: 1 2 - 7 April 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009

OS: Windows Vista/7
Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (Dual-Core)
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Graphics: NVidia Geforce 275 GTX +512mb memory
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 2 GB available space
Sound Card: windows compatible sound card