THIS GAME IS RATED T FOR TEEN (13+) AND WILL CONTAIN THE FOLLOWING:

• Mild Violence & Gore
• Mild Frightening & Intense Scenes
• Mild Profanity

Mild Alcohol, Drugs & Smoking

FOR MORE INFO ON THE GAME’S RATING, CLICK HERE!

Pizza Tower by Tour De Pizza is a fast paced, side-scrolling platformer game that follows Peppino Spaghetti, a stressed out Italian pizza shop owner, as he tries to stop a floating pizza from blowing up his restaurant with a giant laser. Sounds really confusing, right? Well, what if I told you this game is actually a lot of fun? To properly rank this game, I will be splitting the game up into four main categories: Main Gameplay, Sound, Visuals, and Value from playing. This will likely be the ranking system used for all future Chronicle Game Reviews as well. With that being said, let’s get started.

THE GAMEPLAY
In Pizza Tower, the main premise is completing rooms and getting these sentient foods appropriately named “Toppins” to get enough money to pay for the Boss Room, defeat the boss, and progress to the next floor. When you first start up the game, you will be shown a little opening animation that explains the context of why Peppino is in the tower. After the animation, you will be greeted by Peppino sitting in the dark, sitting in a chair. When pressing any key or clicking, the lights will flicker on and you will be able to select a save file to start on.

When you finally get into playing, there is a tutorial room and a blockade keeping you from continuing until you complete the tutorial. The tutorial is overall fairly simple, teaching you about some of the key movement options within the game. It also teaches you about one of the game’s mechanics like Toppins & Pizza Time, but what they don’t tell you about is ranks. After completing the tutorial, the rest of the levels will be opened up to you. After you complete a level, you will be given a rank from D to A depending on how many points you get before completing the level. After completing a level for the first time, you can play the level again and there will be a hidden portal for a second lap. Going through this portal during Pizza Time will send you back to the end of the level and reward you with some points and the ability to receive a S or P rank. S and P ranks both require you to find all secrets within the level, every toppin, and to unlock the Jerome room to get the secret item. However, to achieve a P rank, the highest rank in the game, you need to do everything listed before without losing your combo. Your combo meter must never end completely if you want that sweet P rank.

The levels are all creative with nice backgrounds, with a wide assortment of creative enemies. The levels feel easy enough to beat, but hard enough to master. And that is why I will give the gameplay a 10/10.

SOUND
The sound quality overall in Pizza Tower is pretty good. Now of course you have the songs within the game, and the boss themes are great. Not to mention the fact that each level has its own song. And each title card has its own little jingle before you enter the level. There was definitely a level of hard work put into that. Not to mention the fact that even the pause menu and the save file select screen have their own songs too. It feels like there was a lot of effort put into the music in this game, and that’s only the songs.

The SFX in this game is so fitting. Every little movement or action has its own sound effect which I love. I feel like the sound for this game deserves a solid 8/10. Clean sound and nice songs, but nothing I would just listen to everyday casually.

VISUALS
The game uses pixelated art style, and it’s used beautifully. The animation feels so smooth and fluid. Almost every frame of animation has so much character and effort put behind it. The sprites utilize the squash and stretch principle of animation very well. Peppino, the main character you play as, has over 5,000 sprites! (Sprites are 2D images that represent animation, effects or objects in a game, like frames in traditional animation.) And those are just for one character! The sheer amount of hard work and passion that went into every last one of these sprites is nothing short of admirable.

Each character has very noticeable traits that give them a little bit of flair either within their design, or their animations, or in some cases both! For example, The Noise. The Noise is the third boss you fight in the game, and feels like a great representation for amazing character design. Both his animations and his appearance go hand in hand, with him looking like this annoying egotistical gremlin, as a reference to Domino’s “The Noid”, with his animations and actions within the boss fight reflecting that very annoying cocky and egotistical look. All this isn’t even to mention the backgrounds of the game, which in of themselves are extremely impressive. The backgrounds I personally loved the most were the backgrounds for the boss fights in the game.

After entering the second phase with any of the bosses, the background will change and may even begin moving. This also comes with the bosses changing up their attacks, or elements of the stage changing to try and trip you up. Accounting for the sheer work and effort of all the backgrounds and character design done in this game, I will give the visuals a 10/10.

VALUE
As of currently, Pizza Tower is available on Steam and on the Nintendo Switch/Switch 2 for $20 which isn’t too bad when compared to other indie platformers like Hollow Knight: Silksong and Celeste, with their prices all matching each other. However, when comparing Hollow Knight and how much you’re paying for each game, Pizza Tower is severely lacking in terms of content, seeing as after you reach 101% with both playable characters, there isn’t really much else to do. That is until modding comes into the picture.

Since Pizza Tower is no longer receiving any updates, as confirmed by Tour de Pizza, the modding community has been carrying most gaps in terms of content on their backs. Things like new playable characters, harder mechanics, and sometimes rewriting the story and game altogether. It’s the effort that the modding community puts into this game that really builds on the actual price of the game and makes it so worthwhile to play. Pizza Tower without any mods will be getting a 7/10 in value and Pizza Tower with mods will be a 10/10, which I will average towards a median of 8.5/10.

FINAL THOUGHTS
With everything said and done, it’s time for Pizza Tower’s final judgement. Pizza Tower received a 10/10 for gameplay, an 8/10 for sound, a 10/10 for visuals and an 8.5/10 for value. When averaged out, Pizza tower gets a final score of 36.5/40, giving it an overall score of 91%. A very high rating for an amazing quality game. You can clearly feel the effort put behind Pizza Tower. If you like fast-paced platformer games and zany over-the-top art and animation, then I’m surprised you haven’t played this game yet. And if you don’t have $20 lying around to buy the game, then you better get to scraping your money together and couch diving for cash.