Remember all those 16-bit platformers from the 90s? The kind that let you loose in a huge level and made you scramble around collecting stuff? We played them as kids but being completely honest here, they sucked. As a kid you don’t really pay attention to the putrid level design, bad controls, annoying enemies, or tedious mechanics. Sounds heretical to say, but the 16-bit era was lousy with this type of game. For every good game like Super Mario World, you had four more like Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit, Radical Rex or any of those horrible Viacom games, like Beavis and Butthead or Ren and Stimpy.
The creator of Pizza Tower looked at those games, specifically the ones from Nickelodeon, and thought “What if those games didn’t make you want to jam screwdrivers into your eyes?”
Thus came Pizza Tower. A game that plays as if those games were designed by people who gave a damn, with all the bad parts completely absent. It features the giant levels of 16-bit era platformers, but designed so that they are fun to navigate and not just a series of platforms slapped together. You go fast, something games of yore were obsessed with, but with some of the smoothest control schemes seen in a videogame and levels that were actually made to accommodate your manic speed. It provides an experience that can only be described using words like “radical”, “gnarly”, “totally tubular” or any other horrid, outdated gen-x catchphrase.
Gameplay:
The first thing you’ll notice when playing Pizza Tower is that Peppino can really run. A bit too well. For the first few minutes you’ll be familiarizing yourself with the game’s various runs, wall runs, jumps, butt-slams, slides and many other verbs. Controlling the game at first is like trying to catch an especially greasy slice of pizza right out of the oven, and only half as painful. After several minutes of fumbling around your brain rewires itself, everything clicks like an old 8-track and you find yourself speeding through the levels like a true pizzaiolo.
Mastering the movement takes a bit of time, but it is incredibly rewarding. Every mechanic in the game contributes to either increasing or maintaining speed and momentum. Jumps flow seamlessly into dashes, which can be chained into slides then crouch into a super jump you can then dash out of at full speed. It makes you earn your speed and makes sure you have fun preserving that speed. It’s an active process. You don’t hold right and speed through the level like in some Sonic games, which makes just moving through levels fun and exciting.
The legendary Wing Man
As you defeat enemies you increase your combo counter. This counter ticks down until you renew it by picking up collectibles or defeating enemies. The higher the combo, the higher the score. The higher the score, the better the grade you get at the end of the level. The better the letter grade at the end of the level, the more dopamine gets released into your brain, so keep that combo going!
The stages are excellent playgrounds for you to use every bit of shmovement available. Every new level offers something new to master. Some levels, like Bloodsauce Dungeon, are more vertical and require you to control your falls for maximum speed. Others like Refrigerator Frigerator Freezerator lean more into platforming.
Each level is made unique through their focus on different mechanics and through excellent theming. Each has its own distinct look. They have their own catchy theme song and they each have unique gimmicks and obstacles. In one level you’re playing mini golf to unlock sections of the level. In another you’re jumping into taxi cabs to explore the seedy alleys of a pig city. In another you’re rolling in a barrel dodging cannonball fire from a pirate. Even when it does traditional video game levels like the ice level or the forest level, the game goes out of its way to infuse them with the unique Pizza Tower touch (the cheese touch?) to turn them from generic into a whole new experience.
Each level is divided into two parts: The regular level where you can explore at your leisure, and the manic dash back to the level’s entrance where you have to race the clock. During the first run of the level, you learn the stage’s specific gimmicks and obstacles. A chance to map a route through the level for when things get serious later on. After you knock down the pillar at the end, the clock starts counting down, the music goes crazy, and you have to put everything you learned to the test and escape. Until you get to a fork in the road, forget which way it was, have a small panic attack and get caught by a giant floating pizza. The stuff of nightmares, for sure, but it also leads to this very addictive loop where you think to yourself “I was so close! One more run and I will get it for sure!” and that one more run turns into “I know I can do it even quicker this time! ONE MORE RUN!” Which is the sign of a great game (or an unhealthy habit).
Adding to the uniqueness of each level are the transformations. Inspired by the transformations in Wario Land, they change Peppino’s movement and give him new ways to bypass obstacles. You can become a valiant knight and slide along slopes, eat a hot wing and air dash through enemies, befriend a chicken and get an angled double jump or even become a flying pizza box. There are 14 total transformations, and they all feel distinct while never becoming a nuisance or detracting from the overall experience.
The way each transformation is introduced and used is genius. At first you get just enough time with a transformation to get their basic idea and understand how it handles, then you’re back to Peppino. A short while later into the level you get another go at the transformation in a section which expands on the first introducing more challenging obstacles, then back to Peppino. Finally at the end run you get a last bit with the transformation with the added stress of trying to get back to the entrance. This structure allows the players to familiarize themselves with the mechanics of the transformation, explore them and get a satisfying amount of time with them. Then, just before you start to get bored of being a flying pizza box, you switch back to Peppino, resuming your usual scrambling without missing a beat. These tightly timed sections make it so that the switch from one form to the other doesn’t feel jarring. Even though you’re going back and forth between two very different control schemes in a short time, it flows naturally.
Bosses seem like something that would be an afterthought in a game like this, but here they work surprisingly well. Each is very distinct in how they look and act. Peppino’s fast movement is just as good in the small boss rooms as it is in a large open level. The controls are tight enough that you can maneuver through precise boss attacks with relative ease.
These fights, like everything in this game, are loaded with personality and really fun to watch unfold. The animations are stellar. There is more soul in one single frame of Peppino’s animation than there is in the entirety of Forespoken. Peppino reacts with fear and trepidation to every weird new thing he encounters in the tower. If he has a shotgun, he’s suddenly emboldened and walks with the confidence of an armed man. When his combo gets high enough his neurotic energy shifts to manic determination. His idle animation matches the player’s own heightened adrenaline. The enemies react to Peppino depending on his state, screaming and shaking in terror if he runs at them full speed.
The entire game is full of personality. The enemies are expressive and full of life. Their whole “schtick” is communicated perfectly in a few frames of animation. The transitions it throws in every now and then still make me chuckle even after seeing them for the hundredth time. The backgrounds are packed with a ton of nonsensical jokes and gags.
It’s a bit of a cliché to say, but it really is like playing a cartoon.
The P-Rank
The game features a grading system, like Devil May Cry or Sonic Adventure, where at the end of the stage you are evaluated based on a combination of your time and score. You can play the level well and get an S rank or do everything right and get a P rank. To get P-rank in a level you must:
Rescue every toppin’ (the little pizza topping guys that follow you around)
Complete all three secrets
Find the Janitor and get the secret treasure
Get an S-rank score
Complete the second lap of the escape
All of this in one combo from start to finish.
The dopamine hit makes it all worth it.
The game shines its brightest when going for P-ranks. Sure, you can enjoy the game at your leisure. It’s fun to just run around and explore the stages, appreciating all the different animations and background gags, but everything really comes together when put under pressure.
A lot of games completely break down when the slightest bit of difficulty is applied to them. An example that comes to mind is Shadow of Mordor and its Trials of War mode. The game is serviceably average when played casually, but the moment you try to push it the wheels come flying off. Every context-sensitive action becomes a pain in the neck and the once-amusing War Chief introductions become a flow-breaking nightmare. In the regular game, you can tolerate one or two of these monologues. The main campaign doesn’t expect much from the player. The trouble starts when you’re trying to keep a combo going for points and you get interrupted by multiple chiefs in a row all spouting their unskippable taunts and soliloquies.
What I’m getting at is that a lot of games nowadays are meant to be taken slow. They don’t want much out of the player, and when the player wants to get something more out of them, they buckle.
This doesn’t happen in Pizza Tower. Not talking about the Orc speeches. There are none of those, but the game really comes together when pushed, rather than falling apart. You have to really use all those mechanics the game teaches you if you want to get everything. You have to understand how the combo system works, how to maximize your speed through certain sections to make sure you don’t drop the combo. Every little move that seems like just a neat trick gets put into a context where you need to use it in order to achieve the coveted P-rank.
Soundtrack:
The soundtrack is amazing. Each track is bizarre, quirky and incredibly catchy. A great mix of styles and sounds that fit every stage perfectly. Using funky bass lines and chiptune beeps and bloops it perfectly captures what you remember the 90’s sounded like. A lot of tracks have random screams thrown in, or as is the case in the Gnome Forest theme, monkey sounds as an accent to the track. They’re equal parts cartoony and genuinely great.
There are a ton of songs, too. The whole soundtrack clocks in at around three hours (and is available for purchase here). Each level has three songs: A main theme, a rearranged theme for the second half of the level and a smoother more relaxed remix for the secret rooms.
For a taste of the soundtrack, here are some of my personal favorites:
Oregano Mirage (Oregano Desert theme)
I love the funky slap bass that opens the song, which then switches into an incredibly high energy track with a hummable melody.
Mmm yes put the tree on my pizza (Gnome Forest theme)
More funky bass. This time with a nice, soothing chiptune melody and some curiously out of place monkey noises. The little woodwind solo is a great touch, too (the melody is an interpolation of Tyler, The Creator’s Jamba. Once you hear it you can’t unhear it.)
It’s Pizza Time!
An easy favorite. The breakout hit from the soundtrack. It perfectly captures the frantic, crazed feeling of dashing to the end of the level to beat the clock. Sometimes I sit and look out the window and ask myself if I really am ready to get funky. I don’t know. I just don’t. This song slaps like an angry ex, nonetheless.
Conclusion:
Pizza Tower is an easy recommendation. It’s fun and forgiving enough when played at a casual level, offering a lot to see and do. You can get your money’s worth just enjoying all the personality the game has to offer and playing through its inventive levels without worrying about ranks. If you want more, then the ranks are waiting. You can go through and perfect your runs through a level, crafting a route that ensures you collect everything in the fastest way possible. All while getting a real sense of how everything in the game works together and clicks to make going fast fun and challenging. I’d say it’s the best Sonic game in decades, but that’s low praise. It’s a fantastic game all around that you should definitely pick up.
You, speeding to the Steam store to pick up a copy of Pizza Tower