Tower of Guns

The next one is a sort of double header and also comes with the end of an achievement hunting thing for me known as ‘The Stack.’ Stacking is where you can have two versions of the same game with the same set of achievements so can earn them multiple times. I’ve done this before with Tell Tale games when they have gone free with Games with Gold but some people take this to the next level. You can have up five different versions of Batman: Arkham Asylum, which is a good game, but not complete-it-5-times good. The most notorious game for this is Minecraft which can be stacked a horrendous 11 times, including on Nintendo Switch.

Anyway, my point was for some obscure reason, Tower of Guns has a special edition which is available in Europe and for some bizarre reason I bought it and earned all the achievements twice. I have no idea why as I hadn’t played Tower of Guns to know if it was good enough to warrant two playthroughs. It’s not and I’ll be saving future stacks for games that deserve them. Like the Ezio Collection or L.A. Noire perhaps?

Tower of Guns is a very simple game. You are given a gun and a tower and you go from floor to floor shooting stuff to progress. The more you play, the more stuff you unlock such as different guns and different perks to change the way the game plays. For example, I found the game nearly unplayable without the TooYoungToDie perk on. Probably because I’m so shit at the game that the enemies loved seeing me enter a room so they could get some decent target practice in.

You fight your way through a series of rooms and then face a giant boss. Once the boss is dead, you move on to the next level. There are five levels that need to be cleared and once you have done this, you have completed the game. You are assessed on your overall performance across all runs so if you die 49 times and win once, you are given a win ratio of 2%.

Aside from Normal Mode, there is an Endless Mode which puts you back at the start so you can go around again… against harder enemies.

Looks wise, I found it to be too close to Borderlands to like and once you’ve done ten runs, the music will start to drive you mad. There are these things called Hugbots that if you don’t kill them, you get taken to this special place to get special rewards (the rewards were always shit and ineffective when I went there) and the music gets worse, like they are singing at you. No one wants that and no one asked for it.

Another issue I had a few times was when I started getting not-totally-shit at the game, some of the levels filled up with so many enemies that the game couldn’t cope and the frame rate fell off the edge of a cliff.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

It’s a small haul that took me 7 hours the first time and less than 6 on the second playthrough so it’s not bad but the gameplay will make you want to power through and get it done as quickly as possible which is why my second time was quicker despite RNG not doing me any favours. That sums up completing 80% of the list - Random Number Generators.

Anyway, starting out will knock two out straight away. You get an achievement for killing a boss, so completing one level, and an achievement for unlocking your first gun. These ones are just handed to you for taking part.

The next ones are sort of miscellaneous and there are four of these. Showing how badly designed the game is in places (and confessing this in loading screens does not make it acceptable) there is a ‘TILT’ function which allows you to respawn at the start of the floor. Doing this 10 times in a row for no reason, however, is an achievement. There are also achievements for staying airborne for 45 seconds (easy when you find a level with an air elevator that pushes you up) and the true random ones for killing 350 enemies in one level and dying while a boss is exploding. The former is random because I encountered very few levels with 350 plus enemies in them even if you hang around, and the latter because it requires you to get shot after you’ve killed a boss. I had to force the issue with this in the first game and commit suicide as the boss was exploding to get it to unlock.

The next two are for actually finishing the game which highlights that there is something called an Uberwin where you fight something called the Maw but I never did this because you don’t need to. You also get another achievement for completing ten runs, win or die. I’m trying to lay these out in order as the next ones are the actual work…

There are two achievements for unlocking all the guns and all the perks. Both of these follow the same trends of having to complete various things in the game to unlock them. Getting 5 health pick ups in one life was a pain despite the fact it gives you two for free on each run. Finding five secrets was also painful as the level design hides things really well and only allows you to get some of them if you have specific jump power ups – so more RNG.

The biggest RNG issue I had though, was on my second run. You need to destroy 24 ‘tanks’ to unlock one of the guns and in the Special Edition, these seem to come at a premium.  I did loads more proper runs to try and get tanks, but none would spawn until levels 8 onwards in Endless Mode and sometimes not even then. Typically, when I only needed one more, 5 spawned at once and at that point, I felt like the game was just taking the piss.

After this is all done – which took me between 20 and 25 runs on both games – you simply have to get a gun that fires explosive rounds, point it at your feet, and fire until you are dead. Rinse and repeat and before you know it, you will have completed 50 and 100 runs and unlocked the last two achievements.

Downloadable Content – N/A

According to True Achievements’ genre team, this is my first foray into the Roguelite genre of games and I can’t say it’s made me want to play more of them. I do have a couple in my collection – Spelunky and Paranautical Activity but they are so hard they will likely never appear on this blog… or will they? No. They won’t.