Back in the good old days of about fifteen years ago, first-person shooters were not about gritty soldiers with modern weapons, cover mechanics and no sense of irony. They were about faceless and fearless heroes zooming around colourful environments, blowing hundreds of enemies to gibs with ridiculous weapons. Tower of Guns is a game that gleefully recalls a happier time.

In its mission to bate those nostalgic for Serious Sam-esque shooters, Tower of Guns takes all of the conventions of old first-person shooters, warts and all. As a result, there is literally no story or even a pretence of one.

The context for the game is: you’re a ‘good-looking gamer’ playing a video game in which you shoot lots of baddies, so get on with it. Anyone who’s played Painkiller will know that the story tends to just get in the way, so it’s refreshing to see a developer willing to dispense with it, instead focusing on making the player laugh whilst delivering a solid experience.

Through-out the game, the player comes across little circular robots who are supposedly there to aid the player, but really just tell jokes. While not all the jokes hit well – forth wall humour is a little overdone – I chuckled enough to make the experience a little more pleasant.

Anyone who has played a first-person shooter from the 90s will feel at home playing Tower of Guns. Each room is crammed with enemies, and to withstand the constant barrage of projectiles, the player has to circle-strafe and fire constantly. It’s frantic and fun and never really loses its kick.

As the game progresses and the difficulty ramps up, you’ll die over and over again. The rooms become jam-packed with antagonists, and at times it can feel more like a bullet-hell shooter, where the key to survival is to judge the flight and trajectory of each enemy’s projectiles, and bob and weave accordingly. It provides so much more satisfaction than simply bobbing behind a bit of wall and waiting for your health to regenerate.

Despite the lack of regenerative health which has become so ubiquitous in modern gaming, Tower of Guns never feels too oppressive, as enemies reliably drop health tokens. However, the developer included an intelligent way of ensuring the player will try their damnedest to preserve their health.

Through each playthrough, the player’s chosen weapon can be upgraded by collecting upgrade tokens. Each level the weapon is upgraded makes it visibly more effective and satisfying to use. However, if the player takes too much damage, the weapon downgrades, making dodging attacks essential.

Each weapon is unique and caters to different play-styles. There’s slow-moving but hard-hitting guns, and there’s fiddly but ultimately rewarding weapons like the gun that fires circular plates, which was my personal favourite.

As a low-budget indie game, Tower of Guns had limited resources to work with. The cell-shaded graphics work quite well, and will remind most players of Borderlands, but the colour-palette leaves a lot to be desired. You can only have so many shades of brown in one game.

The boring level design and colour-palette is probably the result of the fact that the game is a randomly generated rogue-like. This comes with advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, the game is endlessly replayable. It ensures this by offering a wide range of guns and perks to alter each playthrough whilst also offering incentives to unlock.

However, as I alluded to earlier, random-generation often results in bland level-design because each level is built from the same parts. Each new room will offer different enemies and slightly different layouts, but it’s not enough to make each playthrough feel completely unique.

The level design isn’t a deal breaker though, and the player will feel satisfied and rewarded enough to keep coming back. Each level is filled with secrets to find, and each is capped off with a huge, daunting boss battle. It’s a simple formula, but it works incredibly well.

Tower of Guns is available on Steam and Xbox One, and is currently free to play for anyone subscribed to PS-Plus, and it comes highly recommended. It’s fun and cathartic, and strangely unique on the PS store at the moment. It’s not an experience you’ll think about much, but as a fun little game to drop into and blow off a little steam between intense Bloodborne sessions, its unmatched.

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