You always feel satisfyingly in control, and you’ll always strive to do a little better or a little more just to see what kind of things you can get away with.Īctually, much like the Wario Land games, the word that really separates Pizza Tower from pretty much everything else out there is “mischief.” Even still, the game remains challenging enough to ensure that it never reduces itself to the level of a power fantasy. The only serious consequence of taking “damage” (such as it is) is losing your momentum and sacrificing some points from the game’s Devil May Cry-like grading system. You occasionally have to race against the clock and collect items needed to progress, but nothing can really stop you. Much like Wario Land, though, much of the joy of controlling Peppino Spaghetti stems from the fact that he’s essentially invincible outside of the game’s excellent boss fights. It’s a truly impressive bit of design that goes far beyond tribute. They emphasized weight-based momentum, but they rarely allowed you to become the absolute wrecking ball that Peppino Spaghetti so often is. What’s especially impressive about the game’s tightly tuned-momentum system is that the Wario Land games were never quite this fast.
#Pizza tower series
Peppino Spaghetti is not a particularly speedy man, but through a series of special techniques, you can help him reach speeds nature clearly never intended for him to see. Notice that I said momentum and not speed. That’s especially true of 2001’s Wario Land 4, which might be the Game Boy Advance’s best game and one of Nintendo’s finest 2D platformers ever.įrom the jump, Pizza Tower emphasizes one of the most missed elements of that gameplay formula: momentum. Some went so far as to say that they began to prefer the Wario Land games to 2D Super Mario titles of the time. Once upon a time, though, the Wario Land formula attracted a pretty sizeable cult following. Tributes to those titles have also been few and far between. If you’re not necessarily familiar with that style, that’s probably because we haven’t gotten a new Wario Land game in about 15 years. Such games often see you tear through levels, destroying much in your path as you use transformative abilities and special items to solve progression-based puzzles and find hidden items. What is Wario Land-like gameplay? Well, besides the obvious, it’s a style of 2D platforming gameplay that emphasizes momentum, abilities, and almost Metroidvania-like exploration over precision jumps and similar genre tropes. Those are the topping atop the pizza pie of its Wario Land-like gameplay. You’re not really coming to Pizza Tower for the story and style, though. This game walks a fine line between jovial and mean-spirited in a way that few recent examples of that style come close to achieving.
Its ’90s Nickelodeon-style visuals and humor invoke that rare style of childish surrealism that is often funny yet vaguely dangerous.
However, the game embraces that silliness like few others could ever hope to do. The game is…silly, and that’s putting it mildly.
You probably won’t believe me when I tell you that Pizza Tower boasts an emotionally rewarding and thematically complex story, and you’d be right to be skeptical. Naturally, Spaghetti must climb to the top of Pizza Tower in order to stop Pizza Face and save his store. Spaghetti’s peaceful life running a pizza shop is interrupted one day when the nefarious Pizza Face informs the chef that he intends to shoot a laser from atop Pizza Tower and destroy Spaghetti’s pizza store. Pizza Tower (available on Steam) is a 2D platformer that tells the tale of a “surprisingly agile and powerful fat balding Italian” (the developer’s words, not mine) chef named Peppino Spaghetti.
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