![]() Getting to the top of the tower always feels like an achievement, progress that's rewarded with even more bizarre levels like the golfing, stealth and shooting stages. ![]() The result is a highly stylized cartoon, clearly inspired by shows from the 90s. Once you have grasped how to change direction, climb walls and bash through obstacles at top speed the game transforms into a Sonic-like platformer. But this speed needs to be built up and maintained as you move through the level. The faster you travel the safer you are from enemies. Along the way, you need to find the pizza toppings and collect items to enable you to claim strange power-ups.Īs you progress you learn how to use your character's key ability: his momentum. You rush around the levels, barrelling into enemies and obstacles to get to the top and claim victory. Like those Wario Land games, Pizza Tower takes the Mario formula but focuses on movement, exploration and score attack. It's a game that stands out not just for the sentimental updating of a classic, but for how every inch of the experience is like a Tom and Jerry or Nickelodeon cartoon. You traverse each level on a mission to destroy the Pizza Tower that threatens to undermine your own pizza shop. It’s a punishing mechanic, but one where the intensity and relief of success is well worth the cost of failure.Pizza Tower is a fast-paced running and jumping game where you play an overweight yet agile Italian, reminiscent of the whacky-yet-appealing Wario Land games. It helps that the stakes during these final moments are high, because if you don’t reach the start before time runs out, you have to do the whole level again. This frantic race to the start is made even better by the incredible anxiety-inducing theme that starts off like a warning siren and slowly builds before reaching an absolute fever pitch as the timer gets dangerously close to zero. ![]() It’s not a simple retracing of your steps either – paths that were previously blocked off will now be open, and the route you initially took will very often be closed off. The best trick Pizza Tower takes from Wario Land is a countdown that starts once you reach the end goal of every level, forcing you to quickly race back to the entrance in a limited amount of time. ![]() For example, in the level Pizzascape, Peppino can pick up a sword to transform into a knight in armor, which will cause him to slide down slopes, break metal blocks just by standing on them, and pierce through rats that otherwise cannot be killed. Whether that’s a unique feature of the level itself – like the Five Night at Freddy’s inspired “Don’t Make a Sound,” which features enemies that will trigger an alarm if they spot you, chasing you down with the threat of a genuinely startling jump scare if you’re caught – or a unique power up that transforms Peppino and completely changes up his abilities. Just about every single one of the 20 levels in Pizza Tower is built around some sort of creative central hook. But it isn’t just about hastily smashing through walls and plowing through enemies. This essentially makes Pizza Tower feel like a modern version of Wario Land if it were developed by a speedrunner.Īll of this amounts to a game that, when played well, has a speed and pace that rivals that of a Sonic game. Fans of Wario Land 4 in particular will be very familiar with this technique, but the big difference here is that Peppino can also maintain momentum while running up walls, allowing him to navigate through nearly every basic element of any level while continuously running at full speed. While Pizza Tower may get most of the inspiration for its mechanics from the Wario Land series, its levels adhere to the Sonic the Hedgehog mantra of “gotta go fast.” Peppino’s most important technique is the ability to start a dash, and once he builds up enough momentum, he's able to bulldoze his way through enemies, objects, and even walls without slowing down. It’s absolutely unhinged, and does a great job of emulating that 90’s cartoon style of characters constantly being drawn off-model for comedic effect. Peppino himself is one of the most hilariously expressive characters I’ve ever seen, flipping between being an absolute nervous wreck, to a rabid psychopath as he bulldozes his way through lines of enemies, to a musclebound anime protagonist. The art has an intentionally low grade look that generally seems like it was made in MS Paint, but it all somehow comes together to give Pizza Tower a strikingly unique look. Pizza Tower keeps things simple as far as its story goes: You play as Peppino Spaghetti, the down on his luck owner of Peppino Pizza, who suddenly finds himself frantically climbing the neighboring Pizza Tower in an effort to stop the giant pizza in the sky from blowing up his shop with a laser.
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