Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, there’s the way Tower Princess handles upgrades. Every time I hit the continue button to start a new run, I dreaded it. It makes playing the game feel like an endless series of déjà vu and makes every run feel identical. You’re likely to see all of them at least once per run. The sixth time I saw it, I prayed that it would all stop. The first time I saw the room, I thought it was surprisingly out of place. You then hit the red switch, jump down to hit the blue switch again, and then use the first platform to make it to a second platform to hit another lever that opens the way out. My second least favorite room in the game requires you to hit a blue timed switch, jump up to a platform, and hit the lever on the platform. Some you can just go straight to the exit doors. Some rooms require you to defeat all enemies, others have you do a simple series of traps or require you to pull levers. This game has the absolute worst approach to level generation that I’ve ever seen. You have to navigate through traps before jumping on swinging platforms. Once, I exited a room, only to have to go through it again to find a different room. Occasionally, you’ll see the same exact room twice in a row. Sometimes you’ll see the same room twice in one run. Areas are made up of specific rooms that are always the same. Tower Princess throws this out the window. One of the most appealing aspects about rogue-lites is how the random generation keeps you on your toes and makes runs feel fresh. The boss battles are overly long and, again, boring. Tower Princess doesn’t tell you this, so you have to notice that the cannon is something you interact with and not just set dressing like every other object you see. You switch areas by using a cannon in a specific room. Then you have to go to another area to fight a second boss before a door opens that allows you to progress. Your goal is to guide your knight/princess combo through an area and fight a boss. What platforming there is is just as subpar as the combat. I was excited to play this game initially, since it’s advertised as a 3D platformer, but there’s very little platforming. The princess abilities can be handy at times, but many of them are so weak or situational that they can feel mostly useless. You just lock onto an enemy and shoot at it until it dies. The musket shots are weak, and they take too long to refill for my tastes, making the musketeer even more cumbersome. The three-hit sword combo doesn’t have much oomph to it, so the swordsman isn’t fun to use. Homer meet rock.Ĭombat in Tower Princess is mundane, limited, and dull. But every aspect of this game is so poorly executed that I can’t understand how anyone could double down on them. It definitely looks decent for a 3D rogue-lite made by an indie dev, and the central conceit about rescuing specific princesses in order to utilize their special abilities is novel. But Tower Princess was a miserable experience for me. I take absolutely no joy in writing negative reviews, and I take even less in playing bad games. This is definitely not a scene you want a video game to remind you of, but Tower Princess does all the same. After finally being placed in the back of an ambulance, the doors jerk open, sending Homer to repeat the nightmare he thought he had just escaped. But he bit off way more than he could chew and then painfully fell down, hitting countless rocks on the way. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. One of the best moments in The Simpsons is Homer attempting to jump over the Springfield Gorge with Bart’s skateboard.
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