Tomb Towers – Review (PC)
Tomb Towers is a puzzle adventure game that has you exploring rooms in various towers searching for the evil Necromancer with hopes of finding him and presenting him to the king. Gameplay is fairly simple – moving from room to room you’ll find yourself exploring each level collecting coins and keys in order to advance to the next room. If that sounds pretty easy, that’s because it really is. Completing all the rooms in a tower will move you onto the next until your date with the Necromancer himself.
Each room has certain obstacles and puzzles that you must solve in order to leave and enter the next room. Unfortunately, most of these rooms just aren’t hard to make your way through. When you do die you must start at the beginning of the room and with each game over you must start back at the beginning of your current tower. The problem is once you die and return, everything already accomplished stays accomplished – yet the game still makes you redo the room. With precious few obstacles in each room to begin with, taking those away basically means you are tasked with walking through empty rooms aimlessly just because you have to in order to get to the next empty room, eventually returning to the area where you met your doom.
The repetition of roaming through rooms void of enemies or treasures really breaks the experience and makes it easier to die when entering a room with enemies and obstacles simply because you’ve been mindlessly crawling about just to return to where you met your demise. Anything collected or killed will be absent in these situations, but physical obstacles such as fire will still need to be avoided in order to move on.
Tomb Towers is a fundamentally sound game, however it just isn’t that much fun. What it does, it does well. The controls feel fine, albeit minimal. You never feel like you’ve died because of the game itself, which is defintiely one positive aspect of them game. You do have the ability to speed things up if the normal pacing seems to be easy for you, but even on the fastest speed it never feels as tight or nearly as fun as similar titles in the genre such as N++ or even Super Meat Boy. Comparing these games to Tomb Towers may not be completely fair considering they are the best in their class, but when games of that caliber exist it’s hard to recommended a lesser experience.
Recommendation: Tomb Towers feels like a game made twenty years ago. This doesn’t give a nostalgic feeling, it just feels twenty years old. In a simpler time it may have been a huge success when the likes of Castle Wolfenstein and Scorched Earth were all the rage, but up against modern trips down memory lane such as Undertale, Tomb Towers just can’t hold its own.
*Tomb Towers was provided to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion*
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
