Twisted Tower Review – A Charming Carnival of Creepy Chaos

Twisted Tower Review

The original BioShock is one of my all-time favorite shooters. I’m not alone. One of the game’s ardent fans is developer Thomas Brush, whose company Atmos Games has just released Twisted Tower, A love letter to BioShock, vintage Disneyland attractions and more. Twisted Tower definitely has the visual vibe of Irrational’s masterpiece. It also captures the same giddy sense of menacing funhouse machines gone rogue.

Climb the Tower

You play as World War 1 veteran Tiny Martin and your ultimate goal is to win back your girlfriend Charlotte, who dumped you while you were away. She is at the top of the Twisted Tower, which brings together the cheesy animatronics of 1950s amusement park with an art deco accent. The result is a visual style that’s both menacing and full of humorous touches.

Maybe the best thing about Twisted Tower is the level design. The visuals pull from carnival funhouses, amusement parks, cheesy casinos and more. There’s a 1950s-style space station, a spooky forest, a haunted waterpark, a clown casino, and a hotel. They all are built with the understanding that everything is smoke, mirrors, and plywood. None of the environments are too detailed. Everything looks like a bargain-basement amusement park.

This extends to the enemy design. You’ll be fighting evil animated telephones, teddy bears, clowns, and mascots, staples of carnivals and fun houses everywhere.

Choose Your Weapon

Twisted Tower is focused on cartoon violence of a sort. The weapons you’ll be using are a little goofy, like rubber band guns, fart guns, rubber mallets, bubblegum weapons, and slingshots. The arsenal isn’t huge, but certainly in scale with the rest of the game. Most important, though, the weapons are uniformly fun to use.

Twisted Tower borrows mechanics from BioShock and other classic shooters, so there are health and ammo pickups scattered throughout the levels and vending machines to sell you various upgrades. Also old-school is Twisted Tower’s free-aim shooting, which is made a little frustrating due to the game’s slightly squirrelly camera. Or maybe I’m just spoiled by lock-on targeting and out of practice.

Each of the five main areas has an end boss, and without spoiling anything, they are usually tests of your current equipment and moveset as well as reflections of the level’s regular enemies and mechanics. I’m never a fan of “big-boss-in-a-small-room” fights and happily that wasn’t in the mix.

In any case, combat is fast and fun. Enemies attack in manageable numbers and there are a few jump-scare ambushes. One note: while the ambient environmental music has a jazz club vibe, the combat music switches gears to an aggressive retro-action movie feel that is jarringly out of character with the art deco design.

Find the Secrets

Breezing through Twisted Tower will only take a handful of hours, but that’s ignoring a lot of what makes the game engaging. There are lots of secret areas, collectibles, and upgrades. Additionally, the nonlinear structure of progression means that a single playthrough won’t reveal or unlock everything. Some of the levels allow you — or require you — to flip a switch and rotate the room upside down. It’s a clever mechanic for adding secrets and a fresh perspective.

There’s quite a bit of voice acting in Twisted Tower, with the characters of Mr.Twister and Charlotte getting a lot of screen time. Both the dialogue and voice work are good and appropriately over-the-top.

Thomas Brush and a small team have put together an homage to BioShock and other classic shooters. But Twisted Tower has its own set of party tricks and surprises, too. It’s one of those games where a developer’s enthusiasm for a genre leads to a perfect alignment of fresh and familiar. Twisted Tower is a must-play for fans of BioShock, classic first-person shooters, haunted carnivals, and evil amusement parks.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***