Twisted Tower Review: BioShock at the Funfair, on a Budget

Every so often a fifteen-dollar game shows up and quietly embarrasses shooters that cost four times as much. Twisted Tower, from Atmos Games (the studio of Pinstripe and Neversong creator Thomas Brush) and publisher 3D Realms, landed on Steam on August 18 - PC only for now - and it is the strangest fun I have had with an FPS this year.

What it is

The elevator pitch is Willy Wonka meets BioShock, and for once the pitch is accurate. You are Vincent, climbing a grotesque 1950s theme park tower to win back your fiancée Charlotte from the showman-villain Mr. Twister, who taunts you mostly through old TV recordings. The tower itself is the star: every floor is a new attraction, from a fairy-tale forest to a casino to a Mermaid Palace, all sugar-coated menace and mascot smiles that hang around a beat too long.

How it plays

The gunplay is genuinely great. The arsenal leans into the theme park absurdity - a Bubble Gun, a shotgun with a deeply juvenile name, a Marble Magnum that pays out tickets for headshots - and upgrade stations unlock secondary fire modes as you climb. Movement grows with you too, from basic sliding to double jumps and air dashes, and by the final floors the game moves like a proper arena shooter. The campaign runs about four hours and, refreshingly, does not pad a single one of them.

The cracks are easy to spot. There are only a handful of enemy types, and you will have seen them all long before the top floor. The story stays wafer-thin - found notes and TV static do most of the lifting, and Charlotte never becomes more than a goal marker. It is also aggressively linear; exploration rarely pays off, and the Adventure Plus mode with alternate routes did not tempt me back for a second climb.

Who is it for

BioShock fans who miss that feeling of a themed world that hates them, and anyone who wants a tight single-player shooter for a small price. At $14.99 (about 15 euros on Steam here), the value argument is easy. Console players will have to wait - there is no PS5 or Xbox version yet.

Verdict

Twisted Tower is a short ride with a few empty carriages, but the ride itself is inventive, confident and priced exactly right. I walked out grinning, and that is worth more than a longer game I would have quit halfway.

Score: 7/10

Image: Basile Morin / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Illuminated_Ferris_wheel_at_dusk_in_Vientiane,_Laos.jpg