Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Innovative"

One thing that has to be said about Tower of Deus, is that it is part of the Go series by Gamebridge, and the name of the series seems to fit the game perfectly. You see, not only is ToD a great game to play on the go, it is also a game in which you can't stay still for very long. You see from the minute you enter the tower, it will start sucking the life force out of you. In each level the challenge is to make it to the portal at the end without dying. You can enter a flying form that allows you to move up a lot faster, but it also means that your life is drained a lot faster, so it is only for the first few levels that you can fly all the way to the goal. In addition to your life automatically draining, hitting spikes or enemies will reduce your life as well.

ToD is a 2D platformer, so the controls are simple. The only buttons you need are A (used to jump and tapped rapidly to fly) and X to enter or exit your winged form. However the controls are not quite smooth. The biggest annoyance in the game is that you can't turn around while in the air when you jump normally. If you are facing in the wrong direction, you have to turn around while on the ground and then jump. This can be a problem when you are standing on a thin platform and turning around means walking a step back, often just so much so that if you jump you can't grab onto the ledge because you are an inch too far out. In general, this game isn't as fast as many platformers. The walking speed is not so high and the animation for getting up from hanging by a ledge is quite slow.

ToD gives you story and tutorial at the same time. At the start of several levels it shows you that a light appear and tells you the message from a god or goddess that wants to help you on your quest. They always try to find legitimate reasons for everything they put in the tower. The explanations doesn't always make sense, but the new features are usually good. From moving platforms to new enemies, to platforms that appear and disappear, to platforms that are only visible for a few seconds at a time, and in the end there are levels in which you can only see within a small radius around you, which can be really intense.

In short, the developers have found a lot of stuff to put in the levels to make the experience good, and it works. The level design coupled with the winged concept and your ever-leaking life bar makes for a game that is both challenging and somewhat strategic. Some times the game parts the tower into two and you have to pick one – often one which involves flying and one that is harder, but you can make without flying and thus save time (and time is life). After a while, you also encounter levels with rising water (or fire), meaning you have two different kinds of time limits. You might get to choose between a way that takes longer, but involves getting a crystal that gives you some of your life back, or one that is shorter, but has no crystal.

Tower of Deus is definitely a game which you buy for the gameplay. The music is pretty good, but the graphics aren't great and the story is a bit strange – in that it doesn't seem to take itself seriously as being more than a tutorial until after you've beaten the last level. It is the gameplay that will keep you playing for all the forty levels (which took me about three hours to beat). After that, there is some replay value in that the game tracks your best time in a level and the combined time. You can for instance aim to get a combined time of less than an hour, but I doubt many of you would try that.

I would not say Tower of Deus is quite up there with the best 2D plattformers, but at least I have never played a game quite like it before and I did enjoy it.