Let’s conduct a quick inventory of ACE Team’s work:
Zeno Clash (2009) – First-person fantasy brawler doubling as Alchemy Day at the zoo. Activities include beating the holy screaming crap out of other monsters and feeling like you need to take a bath.
Rock of Ages (2011) – Unwieldy hybrid of Marble Madness, skeeball, and tower defense games constructed around the Sisyphus and a progression through other disparate myths.
Zeno Clash II (2013) – Gross.
Abyss Odyssey (2014) – Procedurally generated art nouveau platforming/action roguelike with apparent influence from Mega Man, Karateka, and Super Smash Bros.
All of these games sound like fever dreams rather than revenue-generating piece of entertainment intended to be taken seriously (or sincerely) enough to spend the amount of time and money required to push these ideas into our familiar reality. And, yet, here we are with another ACE Team product so whimsically dissimilar from anything else in gaming’s sandbox. It’s like all the normal development teams are using shovels and buckets and ACE Team’s off in corner combining saliva and old batteries into god knows what. This brings us to:
The Deadly Tower of Monsters (2016) – An isometric monster bashing, casual platforming, and minor loot-grinding romp filtered through a kitschy old school Hollywood science-fiction film then encapsulated in the disguise of that film’s director performing a live recording of the DVD commentary.
How do you turn that down? It’s like we get to live in the parallel world where we got The Deadly Tower of Monsters instead of Bastion. Pitch and performance, however, are two very different facets of a game. ACE Team’s past work has been defined by its otherworldly weirdness, but few of their games were especially remarkable to play. They got by, sure, but it wasn’t until Abyss Odyssey where it felt like they were challenging their mechanics with diverse level design.
The Deadly Tower of Monsters is the most important character in The Deadly Tower of Monsters. Rather than parade the player through a series of nondescript environments, you’re almost always escalating a series of outdoor locations in a perilous accent of the titular tower. Successive acts are defined by classic monsters patrolling certain sections of the tower, with your obvious goal being to reach the very top. Checkpoints are in frequently supply, and teleporting between them couldn’t be easier.
A handful of unique mechanics help The Deadly Tower of Monsters stand out from other loot-driven games. Occasionally enemies will start rising from below, enabling your character to peek over the edge and open fire. This is also used to snipe hidden targets or look around crevasses of the tower for obscure upgrades. Falling off the tower isn’t a threat, but rather a skill to be applied. You can either teleport back to the surface you leaped off or trigger your hover pack for a soft landing. The former is especially valuable, as it allows the player to fall through rings scattered in the atmosphere for extra bonuses.
When you fall off the tower it all passes by in real time. This sounds like a minor detail, and no doubt one you would expect, but it’s awesome in practice. It also sort of allows you to get to places you couldn’t necessarily see or reach the first time. As you progress through The Deadly Tower of Monsters, each of the three playable characters will also unlock an exclusive ability that allows them to get to access unique parts of the tower. Scarlet Nova can run super-fast, Dick Starspeed can blow up giant rocks, and The Robot can create electricity to power a few objects. In the instances where these are used for normal progression there’s usually a character-switching station nearby.
As you climb the tower you will unlock a bunch of melee and ranged weapons. There are ten for each class, but not quite enough variation between them. For half the game I used a tribal sword because it seemed to have a swift bashing ability and made short work of the onslaught of opponents, or at least more so than the tuning fork or space shiv. In the end, I found a lightsaber which seemed to do the same thing while also reflecting incoming laser fire. This also held true for my guns, most of which found definition in variable rates of fire. Exceptions arrived in the frog gun and black hole gun, which seemed to substitute direct hits for an area-of-effect cloud of extended damage.
Progression is handled through a routine channels. Every gun and melee weapon can be upgraded twice through a convoluted combination of gears, which are tokens found in the environment, and gold. I didn’t quite get why there three different gears to worry about when only the gold ones were in short supply, but I managed to cruise past most of the game pretty easily by only upgrading a four of my weapons. All three characters share a level, and perks can be added through a fairly basic skill tree. At each level you can choose to upgrade things like health regeneration, melee weapon damage, and energy for you special attacks. Interestingly, you only gain levels by completing missions. These missions are both obvious (take down a boss) and abstract (kite three enemies into flaming turrets).
There’s something off-the-shelf and unsatisfying about The Deadly Tower of Monsters’ combat engine. I never felt like I had direct control, or was making substantial contact, with my opponents. Melee combat felt “mushy,” for lack of a better word, and ranged attacks couldn’t commit between auto-targeting the nearest enemy and direct influence from my right analog stick. The sluggish battle-roll/dodge move is equally suspect; especially since it careened me off the edge of the tower most times I tried it. This is disappointing because The Deadly Tower of Monsters actually does indulge in a variety of enemy types, but they all seemed prone to repeated button mashing. Even the huge snail creatures with shields fell victim to my cowardly ways of circle-strafe striking.
Pedestrian combat is easier to swallow when it’s washed down with The Deadly Tower of Monsters impeccable madcap presentation. The whole game, from the opening Atlus and Unreal Engine logos to its credit roll, is presented as a real commentary for the fictitious The Deadly Tower of Monsters movie. It opens with the hammy director, Dan Smith, getting a rocky start with the recording studio’s audio guy, Patrick, and proceeds to spin wildly out of control for the next five or so hours.
The degree to which the commentary script mimes and parodies DVD movie commentaries merits appreciation. Smith carries an explicit old school Hollywood bravado and frequently references the low-budget loopholes and safety-code-violating-madness that composed almost every shot in the film. Some of his dialogue is flagged by the player’s arrival in specific sequences whereas other pieces, like when you fall off the world or seem to go off-script and die violently, are contextually sensitive with what you’re doing. Toward the latter half of the game Smith even starts getting bored and tangenting into dense minutia, which is exactly what happens in every DVD commentary I’ve ever listened to. Bastion, as I’ve already mentioned, is the obvious point of reference, but The Deadly Tower of Monsters length and relentless commitment to such a goofy idea allows it to soar through expectations.
Smith’s commentary gets a crucial assist from The Deadly Tower of Monsters’ mock-up of a low-budget sci-fi movie. This is apparent the first time you see dinosaurs and assume the game’s frame-rate has taken a serious hit only to hear Dan Smith reveal the dinosaurs are Claymation and animate that way on purpose. The Deadly Tower of Monsters rides this motif hard for the remainder of the game. Crude wires hold “flying” enemies, Dick Starspeed’s character model defaults to a shitty ragdoll stand-in whenever he’s in a tense action scene, and Dan Smith’s literal fingerprints are on the visible on the lens when he talks about wiping off the dust with his hands. The no-budget feel of the movie draws commentary and explanation from Smith at every angle, and it’s delicious fodder for him to devour.
An eccentric theme and presentation are the reasons to play through The Deadly Tower of Monsters. Like most of ACE Team’s existing work, you’re buying your ticket because it promises one hell of a show. Inventive ideas with perspective and the concept of ascending a huge, outdoor tower put some distance between The Deadly Tower of Monsters and genre conventions, and it’s fine to play through but, really, it’s not why you’re here. You came for an ambitious descent into Chilean pandemonium and The Deadly Tower of Monsters holistically satisfies that urgency.
