Heliotay was here
Reviews for "Fruity Tower"
Great game, loved playing it, reminds me of Enter the Gungeon.
<3
Overall I'm incredibly impressed at the amount of polish and professional construction put into this game. Every little thing in this game is absolutely bursting with juice: the title screen with its buttons that react on hover and explode on click, the satisfying way shooting has gibs fly out of enemies and screenshake to subtly signal kill confirmation, the shop menu with its sliding out tabs and shopkeeper interactions, the way money flies up to the money counter and flips the digits, the great music and how it transitions when combat is over, and so much more than I could list! The game itself is also very charming with a very cute story concept that bleeds into many facets, such as the weaponry named with all sorts of fruit puns and the various fruit-based enemies. Really, really cool stuff!
However, at the end of the day, the core gameplay really didn't excite me that much and I easily found myself getting bored and struggling to continue despite how good it looked. Don't get me wrong, it starts out pretty good what with its decent shooting against various enemies to fight, and I was excited to get to the top of the tower. But in the end it really just felt like a repetitive slog: the players moveset is very simple with no chance for unique expression, the enemies were pretty generic and unchallenging, there were no fun midway challenges like bosses, the combat rooms felt really cramped with no space for moving around, all of the guns were functionally boring and only differed in forced numerical advantages meaning that even slightly fun guns had to be unfortunately left behind due to lackluster damage, and so on.
I think the big killer for me was just how forced the metaprogression felt. It never felt like I was jumping from the balcony to get back to the store because it was getting too hard: it was more that the enemies were becoming too frustratingly spongy and thus I needed a new gun to make the time-to-kill feel less like a slog. But then I'd hate doing that since going back to buy guns would mean that now I'm cashless I have to climb all the way back through the previous floors to get back to where I was because I can't purchase a skip (and even if I could pay to skip a bit, do I want to risk going into debt instead of playing it safe?) Yes, climbing back with a new gun can be a bit nice since you can flex on earlier enemies with your numerical advantage, taking them out in one shot, but I felt that feeling didn't counteract the overall feeling of having to go through it all again to get back, especially since there wasn't any sort of randomization or special events to perhaps freshen things up on a return trip. I just hated having to deal with money and the debt mechanic and so on: it just added so much stress and paranoia that made me optimize the fun out of the game, playing safe to keep money but in doing so making the game so repetitive through backtracking.
There were also other slight annoyances with the game, such as how the gun is, instead of being more logically offset to where their hand is, is centered right on top of our player, meaning that we can't even see our cute lil' guy, and that combat could sometimes be obscured due to the sheer amount of visual flair the game was, what with the overall monochromatic theme, tons of blood, screen-shake, unnecessary limited field of view, and so on. Also I kind of hated whenever I had to buy multiple things from the shopkeeper as it meant watching their animation play out for each item without being able to skip it: little annoyances like that where the juiciness of the game was maybe a bit too indulgent. The tilted geometry of the game could be a bit confusing at well in terms of where collision boxes are, too.
Again, overall I think it's a great game and has some super professional polish to it all, but the gameplay was a bit of a miss for me due to how simple and repetitive it can be and how numerical it all felt. It's still fun and interesting enough that I still plan on trying to make my way to the top though!
EDIT: Made it through and beat the final boss! Boss fight was a bit of a letdown as it was very simple and just one phase, but I did appreciate what a spectacle it was, especially the intro and outro. You'll laugh, but I totally goofed in the outro: after I won the fight and was carrying him over to the balcony, I threw him, only for him to stop short of falling off. I then walked over to pick him up but got a bit too close to the edge and unintentionally jumped off! Luckily I was immediately able to buy my way back to the top and properly throw him off without even having to fight him again, haha! (oh it looks like there is an achiveo for this, so it was actually intended as a possibility, wow)
Prox276 responds:
Very insightful and thorough review as always! I always look forward to these! <3
I'll definitely be working on all of these things in my future games. Specifically creating a more exciting and deep gameplay loop. Kinda went style over substance with this one, I agree. :P
Do every time you enter the tower, do you have to pay a toll or just the money you lost while walking up the steps?
Prox276 responds:
You pay a toll each time you enter the tower :)
Loved it and just beat it. My only gripe is to please add a speed upgrade. Even a really expensive one would've been cool