Pizza Tower Review
Have you ever wanted to become a cheese monster in a desperate attempt to keep your possibly-doomed pizza parlor afloat? If so, you might be interested in Pizza Tower!
Game Summary
In Pizza Tower, you play as Peppino Spaghetti. Peppino has a pizza shop and is in debt to an evil landlord, but that's not his only problem. An anthropomorphic pizza man has also threatened destroy his pizza parlor by shooting a laser at it!
Throughout the game, Peppino gathers ingredients hidden throughout levels to earn money to pay back his landlord while scaling a tower with increasingly unhinged levels in order to confront the evil pizza man.
The game itself has the player go through 5 "floors" which contain ~26 levels total. Each level has its own unique theme and mechanics which are honestly pretty impressive. To beat a level, the Peppino must first reach the "end" of the stage and then run back to the start under time pressure. After beating a level, the player is given a letter rank based on their score, which increases with each defeated enemy, combo, and collectable item. In order to get to the next floor of the tower, Peppino has to beat a boss -- which often includes bullet hell mechanics.
My thoughts
I have so much respect for this game. I could see this being on some people's favorite games list. However, I just wasn't into it. The art style grates on me quite a bit, and I tended to get quite stressed at the end of each level when I had to race back to the start under time pressure.
The music, however, is top notch. I have the soundtrack on my video game music playlist on Spotify and rarely skip over any of the songs. The variety of mechanics in this game are also extremely interesting -- I don't think I've played any other game where I can fly with a chicken on my head, ride on a weenie-horse, and become a ball of cheese in order to defeat evil. The controls are pretty tight too.
Steam Deck Performance
This game runs at a flawless 60FPS on the Steam Deck with 4+ hour battery life. It's an excellent Deck game.
Rating
Rating: 3.2/5: good, just not my thing
(I got a 66% from the game too, so it's pretty much mutual)
This is the screen Pizza Tower showed me after the final boss -- it apparently changes depending on what percent completion you achieve.