Out of all the game genres I like, the one I play least often is shooters. I’m not quite sure why. I like shooters. I spent the entirety of October 2007 playing Halo 3 and had an absolute blast last year with Space Marine 2. Lucky for me then that the first game I got to review for 2025 was a shooter called Project Tower.

Performance

Project Tower is an indie third person shooter from the 4 man team over at Yummy Games. We previously did a preview on the demo released last year, and after what definitely does not seem like 6 months the full release is here on Steam and PS5.

As it’s such a small game I was expecting a little bit of jank, and there was some, but nothing so serious that you couldn’t enjoy your time with the game. Cutscenes in particular were a bit choppy but overall the game looks good and ran smoothly on my PC. I did have one crash to desktop, but it was quick to load back in and was luckily close to a checkpoint. There were a few spelling errors in the subtitles but again not a big issue and the vocal performances were solid – especially for a game of this size!

Keep on Climbing

As you might expect from the title the game has you climbing a tower, fighting alien monsters as you try and win your freedom from your alien captors. Each floor has a different biome – with the game explaining the aliens that abducted you are training different monsters for combat on a variety of planets – which allows there to be a good variety of enemies as you ascend. I do wish that there was maybe more enemies on each floor, as they seemed a little sparse, but it is quite a short game so maybe that’s to be expected. There is also a selection of platforming puzzles (and some straight puzzles) between floors, and in levels, for you to flex your mental muscles along side your reflexes.

The puzzles are either platforming challenges, i.e. you need to shoot spheres to move blocks, wall run from place to place while dodging lasers or run, tilt and jump between icebergs; or top down puzzles where you maneuverer blocks around a board to drop them in a hole. There were also some block moving puzzles in the final level where you had to make use of a specific weapon. They were fun little asides to the combat, and apart from a little bit of occasional jank with the jumping worked quite well.

The real meat of the game is in the combat though. Project Tower is a Bullet Hell shooter, that gave me a few Returnal vibes. The game has a focus on big boss fights where you need to dodge a huge amount of projectiles, while trying to keep your aim as true as possible. There was almost a roguelite feel to it, as you don’t have any healing; bosses need to be taken down in one go. But don’t worry, if you die the furthest back you’ll be going is the last check point so you can bash you head against the bosses for however long it takes. Which might be quite long with some of the later fights.

In fact, I think that some of the endgame bosses could use a little bit of balancing. The last two in particular use attacks that create large rings of energy you need to dodge in a variety of directions. If too many end up on the ground at once then you just have to take damage, which would be fine if there was some type of healing, or the fights themselves didn’t take such a long time. Getting close to the end then being unable to avoid something un-dodgeable felt really bad, especially knowing you had to do it all again.

There’s also one fight where you lose all your upgrades and can I just ask developers of all games to stop this. Especially movement upgrades in games that require dodging. Please.

It’s Morphing Time

The unique mechanic that has been highlighted in our preview and throughout the trailers is morphing. Turns out it’s not just the aliens being trained to be better soldiers. As you progress through the game you will occasionally come across DNA fragments you can scan. afterwards you can then morph into the creature you scanned. In fact it’s not just creatures, there’s a little puzzle in the first area where you use it to morph into a pylon to move around boxes too.

This was a fun mechanic, particularly when it was implemented into some of the boss battles in a unique way. Unfortunately it was used pretty sparingly. You can only morph into your last scanned summon and generally it’s specialised to get past a specific challenge. The pylon puzzle for instance is only used once, and the rest of the DNA you pick up is only used to open doors. I think this feature was really fun and I’d like to see it expanded upon in maybe some DLC or the next game in the series.

Final Thoughts

Overall, my thoughts on the morphing feature reflect my thoughts on Project Tower as a whole. It’s a small and very ambitious project from a tiny indie team, and what they’ve accomplished is great, but it seems like a jumping off point for a bigger more fleshed out game.

As mentioned above the enemy variety is there, however the number of enemies you face on each floor before the boss is very small, so you don’t really get to know the biome they’re in before you’re in the arena fighting the boss. There’s 4 main weapons (the gunplay feels fine), but again the damage differential versus how you use them wasn’t really that much leaving me going back to the machine gun as it had the easiest mode of fire for consistent damage. Maybe being able to use the DNA collected to augment the weapons/increase their damage would be good.

The puzzles are a nice change of pace, and with a few tweaks to some of the feedback systems could be a much bigger part of the game. For the parkour ones, having a feedback sound when you grab a ledge would work wonders and having others that made use of the morphing mechanic would be fun.

All in all there’s a lot of potential here for a great game but as it is Project Tower is only a good one.

Project Tower was reviewed on PC and released on January the 6th 2025 for PC and Steam. We’d like to thank Yummy Games for the code.