A Game About Building a Tower Review (PC)

It doesn’t get more ridiculous than this, folks. As if to illustrate the lack of creativity in the indie build ‘em up scene, AVE Team has literally designed a game that has no real purpose other than, well, to let bored consumers build a tower. And yes, it is A Game About Building a Tower. At this point, I feel as if it’s a common theme. But don’t even get me started on A Game About Digging a Hole. For now, let’s just go ahead and cast our focus on the heavens, and the mundane pastime that’s been hanging over every toddler’s shoulders for centuries. Let’s just build the darn tower and see where it takes us, shall we?

It would be a real waste of time to dress A Game About Building a Tower as anything more than what it says it is on the tin. Frankly, it doesn’t need any kind of special introduction, nor does it need a formal explanation for why it is what it is. It just is. It doesn’t shy away from its true colors; it embraces the fact that it is, to some extent, a larger version of a childhood game based on stackable wooden bricks and rickety pillars with absolutely no structural integrity whatsoever. The rules aren’t drastically different here either, with the gameplay mostly revolving around stacking said wooden bricks on a relatively flat surface, and ascending up into the vast heavens above for a reason that’s completely unknown to most.

If the above bricks and blocks of the scaffolding have somehow managed to captivate you in one way or another, then you ought to stick with us as a while longer as we apply a few more to the pinnacle. Still here? Then let’s build us a tower.

What Goes Up…

At the heart of A Game About Building a Tower is a very simple, albeit frustratingly fickle scaffolding sim—a physics-based puzzler in which your only real goal is to, well, build a tower from the ground up and, with a little luck and finesse, breach the skyline en route to the dazzling heavens above. As a fallen angel who has plummeted to the earth, it falls to you to find a route back to the clouds, even if it means having to alternate between various shapes of brick and mortar to reach tight spaces and essentially defy gravity. And that’s sort of what your goal is here: go above and beyond to humiliate the Egyptian’s poor excuse for a pyramid, and conquer a feat that l nobody else has ever reached before.

The idea is simple: collect feathers en route to the skies, and use said feathers to unlock different brick styles to create distinct structures à la Stonehenge with one too many layers — or something along those lines. And believe it or not, there is a story written into all of this, though I wouldn’t say that it’s worth going into further detail, given the general nature of the situation. However, for the sake of covering all bases, I will say this: the protagonist here has been expelled from heaven, and has returned to earth to essentially face their downfall. The objective here, then, is a transparent one: build a staircase back to the top. That’s about the size of it, anyway. Suffice it to say, it doesn’t boast the most impressive storyline in the world, yet we digress.

Stairway to Heaven

The controls in A Game About Building a Tower aren’t what you would call responsive. Scratch that — they’re temperamental, but they’re also a pain in the neck to master, too. The jumping, for example, isn’t all that easy, meaning that you have an annoyingly high chance of falling to your own creations than ascending them with some form of style and grace. But perhaps that was just from my experience. It could’ve been that I had the brunt of a bad time, and that I simply wasn’t capable enough of conquering my own feats. Or maybe, just maybe, the controls really were designed to test my patience. Either way, the fact that I had a tough time learning the ropes in what should have been a straightforward journey was a distraction that I could’ve done without.

The good news is, A Game About Building a Tower does indeed offer an extra mode for you to peruse—a sandbox mode, of all things. It doesn’t offer a great deal more than the bog-standard campaign, I’ll admit, though it does generate a few additional avenues of freedom for you to enjoy and all of the bricks and buildable materials that tie in with the progression-based story mode. It isn’t quite on the same playing field as Minecraft, though to give credit where it’s due, it does at least make an effort to provide you with the tools to build without limits. It’s just a darn shame that you can’t build, well, stairs. Go figure.

Verdict

A Game About Building a Tower builds its axis on the same surface that helped shape the likes of—you guessed it—A Game About Digging a Hole. Aside from the shift in terrain and altitude, there isn’t a huge difference between either of the two, meaning, if you happened to enjoy the latter and also found yourself something that was worth sticking around for in the one, then you should enjoy turfing up the same slow-paced progression that comes with this sky-high counterpart. As for whether or not it boasts enough to warrant your attention for the long haul is another question. That said, with the inclusion of a creative sandbox mode to accompany its core story mode, it does at least make an effort to squeeze the idea for all it’s worth.

There isn’t much of an endgame to look forward to here, so it’s best not to waltz into A Game About Building a Tower with the hopes of uncovering any sizable post-credits bonuses. Still, if you’re the sort of person who gets a kick out of repeating the same basic chore core work and physics-based puzzles for small but oddly satisfying results, then to be honest, you shouldn’t find it to be too much of a struggle to find your way to the top in AVE Team’s latest build ‘em up sandbox.