Review - Tower 57

Tower 57 is a retro street machine style of top view pixel fast-paced shooting games, developed by Pixwerk and published by 11-bit studios, the developer of This War of Mine. The game uses a relatively rare Dieselpunk style.

This is a fast tempo shooting game where you can move while shooting, you need to keep moving or press the spacebar to avoid enemy bullets, the intensive AI will launch a direct attack, even scattered spewing flames. Your character is very vulnerable and this game has a high degree of difficulty, it is a very skilful hardcore shooting game. You are likely to be game over if you didn't watch out your steps. Fortunately, you can replay the level by clicking on the return key then you will continue from your last autosave checkpoint.

Unlike other games, this game lets you upgrade the body parts of your character. Once you have started the game, find a tunnel into the tower and a story scene will be triggered. Watch the cutscene, the legs of your characters were bitten off by the monster in the room. You could only crawl from now on until your left body parts have been upgraded by "buying" new legs to regain the walking ability. In fact, this is a new rookie guide, which teaches players to upgrade their body parts in such stores to strengthen the abilities of your characters. 

When your character has a variety of main weapons, it can be switched at any time in the game using the C key. The escalation of weapons is carried out in the arms upgrade store in the town. Remember that if you pick up a duplicated falling weapon, do not discard the advanced weapons that you have upgraded before.

The weapon system of this game is very diverse. The game begins with a total of six "extraordinary warriors" to choose from, and three characters can be selected for this game. Everyone has their own unique skills, for instance, the Q cast after you pressing for a long time, normally you will cast it while against the powerful BOSS, the effect is astounding. Next, there is various type of weapons, sub-weapons, weapon props that have fallen in the game, and even a variety of Dieselpunk style vehicles.

Besides the single-story mode, Tower 57 also supports local and online cooperation mode. For a shooting game, online cooperation is always a highlight for everyone.

"Details determine the success or failure", so is this game. This game, allows the player to interact with a lot of environmental scenes using the F key.

As the game progresses, a variety of posters, electronic documents, is to facilitate the understanding of the story background and game player game world, rather than instil rigid and pale game player narrator subtitles.

There are a variety of objects can be destroyed. "Shot blasting" is always excited, it lets people meet the sense of visual impact. Apart from the outside almost impregnable walls, all other objects can batter down, break into pieces, such as the most common cases, monsters, garbage etc.. You can collect hefty bonus coins to upgrade weapons and the body parts. These parts require a large number of in-game currency to power up nor unlock it. Not only can players destroy objects, so as the AI (enemy), their bullets and attacks can also destroy the environment objects.

Furthermore, there is poisonous water and various traps, the end of the branches of these branches are mostly concealed with rich rewards. A little tip here. There are many branching in the dungeon that you can't turn back. Moreover, be aware of the small hints located in places like the downhill terrain. There are directional signs on the stairs. The direction shown by the arrow is signalling you are able to go down, but you cannot turn retrograde. Therefore, in order to explore the whole map, you must think clearly before further down the steps, to avoid going up easily but face a difficulty which is unable to turn back.

Let's talk about the pixel and Dieselpunk style in this game. Generally, pixel style game brings bad impression to potential crude vulgar. Although this game is a pixel style design, it is magnificent and colourful. In the game all the scenes and environment elements are in pixels, are designed to be colourful gorgeous, full of beauty, will never give a monotonous and poor impression on the game player. Pixel style nostalgia for Amiga to PC style is very harmonious.

The design style of the game depicts the concept of a diesel engine as a major energy source, with a highly developed and applied world for diesel engines. Dieselpunk is in human history of the second industrial revolution era for inspiration, design of the diesel-electric era after era, abandon, the use of more pure mechanical power locomotive based, supplemented by a large factory, trust and even multinational giants of the industry concern type, with a chimney of the city, everywhere on the road speeding the roaring rumble of locomotives and cars.

Comparing Dieselpunk and Steampunk style, apart from the difference of the style of painting, Dieselpunk gives you a more dark and decadent feel, the human nature is more distorted, the society is more variant, and the hope is even less.

I would like to emphasise why I would say that Dieselpunk is the main design style of this game. As you could see that the locomotive appears in the opening of this game, oil pipes all over the city, as well as cars passing through the city, tankers that appear many times, and the excessive worship of metal armoured on the body of the characters.

In my opinion, the invariant core of the punk series will always be anti-utopian and antitrust companies. Just like the story in this game, Tower 57 has unstable factors in violation of the society, the emergence of the "rebel farce", you as an investigator, received an order to go into this giant tower and find out what is happening inside there, the ultimate goal is to kill the Final Boss (I'm not sure what is his name because I played in Chinese version).

Lastly, the metal rock music style background music, with the narration and voice-over, further deepens the glamour of the Dieselpunk style of this game. I'm not much into metal rock music but undoubtedly without metal rock theme music, this game will be a flaw.

Before ending my review, I'm glad that this game supports official Simplified Chinese, for Chinese gamers, this is the best gaming experiences because you could get the best sense of immersion, more convenient and unmistakable to understand the game connotation expressed by the official. For your information, this game also supports French, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Portuguese-Brazil, Korean and Turkish in both interface and subtitles.

My rating: 9/10
Tower 57 on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/530950/Tower_57/