Tower 57

Tower 57 is a top-down action shooter that wears its Amiga-era influences openly and without apology. You pick from a small roster of characters, each carrying different starting loadouts, and blast your way upward through the floors of a enormous post-apocalyptic tower. The 16-bit pixel art is genuinely gorgeous, Pixwerk clearly spent real time on every room, every enemy sprite, every crumbling wall. The environments are fully destructible in a way that feels tactile rather than cosmetic: blasting through a partition to flank an enemy patrol is satisfying in a way that a lot of modern games forget to be. The co-op angle is where Tower 57 gets interesting and also where it gets complicated. The game was built from the ground up around two players, and it shows in the encounter design. Puzzles require coordinated actions, certain doors need two switches hit simultaneously, and reviving a downed partner is a core loop rather than a convenience. Playing solo is technically possible, but the pacing never quite recovers from the absence of a second player. Enemy placement assumes two angles of fire. The tone assumes someone next to you laughing when things go sideways. If you have a reliable co-op partner, this game clicks. If you are looking for a solo experience, the friction accumulates fast. The campaign itself is compact - you are looking at somewhere in the four-to-six hour range depending on how much you explore and how often you die. I will say this for it: Tower 57 mostly knows its own length. It does not overstay. The level variety picks up as you climb, introducing new mechanics without over-explaining them, and the boss encounters are distinct enough to feel like events rather than checkboxes. The soundtrack has a properly moody synth-retro quality that fits the atmosphere without being nostalgic wallpaper. What holds it back from a clean recommendation is a combination of factors. The mixed Steam reception reflects genuine roughness at launch that patches addressed only partially. Some players report a playthrough that feels front-loaded with setup and slow to find its rhythm. The character differences, while present, are shallow enough that build variety is not really a selling point. And the story, framed around the tower's dark societal structure, gestures at something interesting without fully committing to it. There is a mood here, a world that feels lived-in, but the narrative beats do not quite land the punches the setting promises. For the right pair of players who grew up on Chaos Engine or Smash TV and want something that looks like a love letter to that era, Tower 57 delivers real craft in a small package. Just go in with a friend lined up and keep your expectations tuned to the genre rather than the premise.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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