There’s rarely a better feeling than shooting an arrow post-mortem to end your friend’s preemptive victory celebration with their death. For the dozens of hours my friends and I played TowerFall Ascension, our friendship may have stayed, but our rivalries grew. You know a game has you and your friends hooked when it’s 3 a.m. and everyone is demanding rematches.
It seems odd to think of a time when multiplayer was only between those looking at the same television screen, and the competitors you faced would be friends and family rather than a random opponent found online. While the convenience of the internet has made playing competitively with others much easier, the same tension and rivalry that was fueled by knowing your opponent personally is rarely – if ever – replicated in the same way with online multiplayer. TowerFall, the surprise hit for the struggling Ouya system, has made its way over to PlayStation 4 and PC as TowerFall Ascension, and brings with it the triumphant return of local multiplayer and all of its glory.
One of the first things you may notice about TowerFall Ascension is that it joins countless other games these days that have gone for the more retro, SNES game look. While this idea isn’t necessarily original or fresh anymore, it still can be plenty charming. Seeing your little archer get blown away by a 16-bit explosion rarely gets old, and the game runs smooth as silk, to boot.
TowerFall Ascension adds four more archers to the mix this time, totaling eight, and adds even more of the excellently designed levels to give you a wide range of options when playing. Some levels are fairly simple battlegrounds with ledges to jump on, but other levels have hazards thrown in. Anyone could easily dodge these hazards if they were only exploring, but when these are added in when four people are shooting arrows, dodging, and fleeing from each other, someone always ends up taking a wrong turn and ends up pancake’d.
TowerFall Ascension’s greatest achievement is with its simple, tight controls. There isn’t a command for every button on the controller, and the only actions the game has are movement, jump, fire arrow, and dodge. While this may seem like shallow offering, TowerFall relies on a plethora of different arrows, buffs, and stage modifiers to vary the experience around its initial simplicity. Along with games like Nidhogg and Samurai Gunn, TowerFall Ascension is another example of how games can still be incredibly deep because of the players’ strategies with limited tools.
Each player starts out the game with limited arrows, and they aren’t exactly easy to replenish, either. This makes every shot count, and every missed shot hurt even more. You can pick up other fallen arrows, and even ones that have impaled recently deceased friends, too. If you find yourself out of arrows entirely, you aren’t totally out of options. If you dash while an arrow is shot at you, you’ll catch your opponents arrow and take it for yourself. This can create some of the most awe-inspiring moments in TowerFall, as my friends and I had volleys going back and forth of catching arrows, shooting them back, catching again, and so on. If you find you cannot get arrows to try and end your opponents lives, you can simply do your best Mario impression and jump on their head like it’s a goomba. It always feels good stomping out your friend when they are stocked with arrows, and the more aggressive players tend to rely on stomping as their main attacked rather than a last-ditch effort to win.
Trials are incredibly challenging, so prepare to restart a lot!
Multiplayer is TowerFall’s bread and butter, but what about its single player? The short answer is that it isn’t that bad. If you’re eager to test your skills and reflexes against AI (and trust me, you will be tested), TowerFall offers two single player modes (the latter of which does offer a two-player co-op mode): Trials, which has the player trying to eliminate targets within a short period of time, and Quest Mode, which tasks the player with eliminating waves of monsters. There isn’t too much to explain about either of these modes. Both are fairly straightforward, but they’ll challenge every aspect of your TowerFall skills. I spent a handful of hours into each mode, and while I had a decent time, I was still itching to get back to the multiplayer.
TowerFall Ascension is a reminder that local multiplayer is one of the most thrilling ways to play competitively. The decision to exclude online multiplayer is a bold move – and some may wish there was – but it seems like the game’s creators knew it was the best way for gamers to experience their title. TowerFall Ascension isn’t just the best multiplayer game for PS4, it’s one of the best games on the console. I haven’t had this much fun playing a competitive game with friends since the original Super Smash Bros., and the countless hours mixing together game types and variants led to playful shouting, heckling, and laughter that few games can even come close to replicating. If you’ve got three friends and TowerFall Ascension, you’re bound to have hours upon hours of fun.
This review is based on a review copy of the PlayStation 4 version of the game TowerFall Ascension by Matt Thorson, distributed by Matt Makes Games.
- Incredible Multiplayer
- Simple, Tight Controls
- Weaker Single Player