Games are crafted by teams of all shapes and sizes. AAA games have hundreds of staff in different departments, whereas indie games will have a small team or in some cases one single developer. Indie studio Yummy Games are a team of only four people, and after a long development process it’s finally managed to release its debut game: Project Tower. A beautiful, third person shooter where you solve puzzles and fight a plethora of strange, alien enemies.
It’s a great achievement and Yummy Games definitely should congratulate itself; however, after spending upwards to about five hours with the game, it’s unfortunately an experience that I would never want to revisit.
Project Tower’s story has a lot of interesting ideas. The game puts you in the shoes of a human prisoner held captive by an alien race known as the Hiks. The Hiks have taken over humanity, enslaved its people and are forcing them to partake in a series of challenges in this large tower. You are one of these people. Your goal is simple, ascend the tower, complete the challenges, defeat the bosses and claim your freedom from the invaders. It’s an intriguing premise that offers a lot of question you want to know the answer to. Who are the Hiks? What do they want? Why have they enslaved humanity? Unfortunately, a lot of these questions are left unanswered and you’re given a story that has nothing interesting to say.
Characters will get introduced and spout exposition, but they’re swiftly forgotten about until the plot requires them. I remember nothing of note from this story, there was no interesting moment or memorable scene I can recall that made me excited or invested in the story. I went in knowing nothing about the world and left virtually the same, and that is incredibly disappointing.
Project Tower’s gameplay mostly boils down to three main components; running, dodging and shooting. These three make the combat easy to understand and doesn’t needlessly complicate it by trying to be different. However, the game will introduce new things along the way. These are either new abilities such as dash which can be used for either combat or traversal, and more guns such as an assault rifle, a bow with explosive arrows, and what I believe is a hand shotgun. Whilst each weapon is fun to use, and the variety is much appreciated, I found myself sticking to just one or two guns through out my playthrough. The only time I changed weapons was when I ran out of ammo or needed it to advance the story.
The biggest feature that the devs hyped up was the morphing ability. At certain points in the game you’ll have the option to morph into an alien creature and use their powers to advance the level. Whilst it’s an interesting concept, and possibly the most fun feature in Project Tower, it isn’t utilized as much as the devs claimed it would be.
Each creature you morph into is tied to a single level, meaning you can’t morph into a specific creature at any time. This is incredibly disappointing as the devs hyped this up as a core feature of the gameplay, but is instead heavily underutilized, making the game feel incredibly linear. However, it definitely is a unique idea and I think that with a little more fine tuning it could have been really fantastic.
And I think that last sentence summarizes my feelings towards Project Towers’s overall gameplay; it needed more refinement. A perfect example of this would be with the boss fights. In the boss fights, you’ll be fighting the toughest enemies and will have to utilize all your skills to beat them. However, the bosses will also throw a plethora of attacks at you like a ridiculous amount of orbs and lasers. When dodging these attacks, I felt as if I had a 50% chance of success. Some of the attacks that I thought I had dodged successfully still hit me or some that should have hit me didn’t. In addition to that, the amount of attacks the game throws at you at once is just so absurd. There were times when I looked at the amount of orange orbs on screens just baffled at how you could possibly dodge all of these unscathed.
But, I do think that this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if the controls were a lot smoother. For all the hours that I played, I found Project Tower’s controls and mechanics to be its most frustrating element. For example, certain animations have this brief window where you can’t move until it’s stopped. I vividly remember one boss fight in particular where this became a nuisance. In this fight you have to morph and use the creature’s telekinesis to throw rocks at the boss’ shield to bring it down. However, if you morph at the wrong time, you’re locked in a two-second animation and potentially risk being hit by these lasers that will come hurtling towards you. This may seem very minor to some, but it’s another example of Project Tower’s gameplay flaws desperately needing to be refined. Unfortunately, it’s because of this that Project Tower’s gameplay feels incredibly frustrating.
Whilst the story and gameplay left me wanting more from its ideas, the graphics are far from a disappointment. Running on Unreal Engine 5, Project Tower looks absolutely stellar. The level of detail in each of the worlds and character models are astounding, and I occasionally found myself stopping to admire the level of attention Yummy Games put into them. I was mesmerized by the sheer beauty of the worlds and, coupled with the stellar music, found myself entranced by them. That doesn’t mean to say that it’s flawless, there were a few graphical errors I noticed along the way. The most prevalent of these was a weird shadow screen tearing effect. Whenever the camera was moved, especially on lighter terrains like snow, there would be a noticeable shadow that would be left where my character was previously stood. This isn’t game or immersion breaking and is nothing more than a little minor hiccup I noticed.
What is immersion breaking is the lack of sound effects. Acts that you or an NPC do that you think should generate sound, for some reason, don’t, and there were times where I thought my game bugged out. It’s especially annoying when you take damage in combat. I expected there to be a sound that played when you got hit and the lower your health the more frantic the sound — something akin to Halo’s shield mechanic. However, there’s no sound when you get hit and instead you’ll have to look at your health, which then take your eyes of the enemy and risk being hit again. It may seem minor to a few of you, but it hinders the player experience and makes the game come across as unfinished.
Project Tower has a lot of good ideas and can be fun at times, but it’s hindered by its lack of polish. The combat can be engaging, but quickly becomes frustrating thanks to the lack of smooth controls and animations. The story has an intriguing premise, but the game never commits to expanding on the universe it so desperately wants you to connect with. And even though the game is beautiful, the basic missing technical components give the game this unfinished feel. However, I will say that, for a debut game, Yummy Games has created something to be proud of. With a few more months in the oven, this game could have been really good, but after trudging through this infuriating experience, I have no intention of climbing the tower ever again.
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