The Deadly Tower of Monsters opens with an astronaut crashing his ship on a planet ruled by a tyrant, and it never pretends to be anything else. ACE Team built the game as a metafictional parody of the science fiction B movie in its golden age, complete with caricatural superheroes. Atlus published it for PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows in January 2016. The result is a shooter that knows exactly how silly it is and charges ahead anyway.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
Dick Starspeed Crashes on Gravoria
The plot follows three actors inside the in-game movie of the same title. Jonathan Digby plays Dick Starspeed, the astronaut hero who wrecked his ship on the outlandish planet Gravoria. Stacy Sharp plays Scarlet Nova, the space diva and daughter of the planet’s evil Emperor. The Robot plays Robot, Starspeed’s co-pilot and sidekick.
Marooned, the trio’s only way off Gravoria sits at the top of a tower. The tower is known for being deadly and for being full of monsters. The game lists them without apology: lizard-men, UFOs, nuclear ants, dinosaurs, robot monkeys.
A Movie From the 1970s, Now on DVD
The frame story holds the whole thing together. The Deadly Tower of Monsters is presented as an early 1970s B movie recently released on DVD. Its in-universe director, Dan Smith, provides a running commentary.
That commentary doubles as the tutorial and as meta-commentary. It explains why default shooter elements appear in what is ostensibly a film. Breaking boxes for items, for example, gets framed as the lead actor ad-libbing on Smith’s advice to make every moment somewhat exciting.
It is a clever device, and it does real work. Most games with this premise would let the joke sit there. This one wires the joke into the mechanics.
The Climb, the Jetpack, the Fixed Camera
The Deadly Tower of Monsters mixes beat ’em up and twin-stick shooter elements. The camera is fixed and top-down. The main focus is one long, continuous climb up the outside of the tower.
A jetpack lets players reach high areas. The structure is simple, and the game does not fight it. You go up, you shoot what is in the way, and you keep going.
The tower is the whole map, and the climb is the whole shape of the thing.
Four-Player Co-op and Hard Mode
The base game supports single player, multiplayer and co-operative play. Two additions landed after launch, both exclusive to the Windows version.
| Mode | Release date | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| 4-player co-op and hard mode (post-launch update) | 14 March 2016 | Windows |
| Survival mode (post-launch update) | 4 October 2016 | Windows |
| Base game | January 2016 | Windows, PlayStation 4 |
The 4-player co-op and hard mode release and survival mode were exclusive to the Windows version. That is the sharpest split in the package, and it is worth knowing before you pick a platform.
Dan Smith Sells the Joke
The best material here is the commentary track. Dan Smith’s voice turns the game’s own seams into punchlines, and the box-breaking bit is the clearest example. A lesser game would have hidden that mechanic. This one names it and makes it funny.
The tower itself is a thinner idea. One continuous climb with a fixed camera is a clean concept, but it is also a single note held for the length of the game. The monsters rotate through the roster the game promises, and the roster is good. Lizard-men, UFOs, nuclear ants, dinosaurs and robot monkeys are exactly the lineup a 1970s midnight movie would have thrown at the screen.
Scarlet Nova and the Tyrant Father
The themes are time-honored and the game knows it. A daughter against a tyrant father. A planet full of innocent ape-creatures. A dashing space-age liberator and his robot companion. A tower full of treacherous mutations.
What the game gets right is commitment. It never winks so hard that it stops being a shooter. The jetpack, the twin-stick aiming and the beat ’em up brawling all function as a game, not just as a gag about one.
What the Score Reflects
The Deadly Tower of Monsters is a metafictional parody executed with more care than the premise demands. ACE Team understood that a joke about cheap science fiction only works if the thing underneath is solid, and it is.
The weaknesses are structural. The climb repeats, and the Windows-only post-launch modes leave PlayStation 4 owners with a smaller game than PC players got. Those are real gaps, not nitpicks.
The critic aggregate across five outlets sits at 7.5 out of 10, and that number holds up. This is a sharp, funny, well-built shooter that runs out of new ideas before it runs out of tower.
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