Scarlet Tower doesn’t have a story, which is odd for an RPG game. What you get for a story are brief character bios which give a little insight into each character you can play as. It would have been nice to have an FMV sequence or even just static pictures with descriptive dialogue. It feels a bit off to play an RPG with pretty much no story to speak of. It’s not a game breaker by any means, as it’s a really good game. Just would have been nice to see some sort of story presented.
Scarlet Tower is an isometric action RPG that plays similar to a tower defense game with you as the player being the tower. What I mean by that is, you’re dropped into an environment and you have enemies being drawn to you, not unlike a tower you have to defend in a tower defense game. You can pick between a couple of classes at the start of the game, each with their own stats, abilities, and weapons. Though there are a couple to start, you can unlock additional classes by lasting a certain amount of time in a single run or obtaining some other specific requirements.
Pick your character and then like I mentioned, you’re dropped into your environment with hordes of enemies swarming you. You would think that this would be immediately overwhelming, but thankfully it’s not, with enemies being pretty easy to kill when you first start the run. As you take out enemies, you’re earning currency and experience. With each level you go up, you’re presented with three to four different perks. This could be a defensive perk like a temporary healing aura , offensive perk like a damaging spell, or passive perk like one that gives you additional damage to your weapon, that will help you to last longer and get you further in the game.
Getting so far into the game and gaining a lot of currency will grant you the ability to purchase permanent perks that stay with you through each run. Now the issue with this is that when your run ends, the game will take a percentage of the currency and this leaves you with not much to spend on permanent perks. This gives the game its replayability factor and an incentive to keep playing.
Scarlet Tower isn’t the most graphically impressive looking game, but what you get with performance is pretty impressive. Graphically, the game presents some great looking pixel art. The 2D sprites of your character and the numerous enemies look really good. Each with their own little animations that have great contrast against the environment everything is moving around in. But that’s really it in the graphics department, like I said not too impressive graphically, unless you have a real appreciation for 2D pixel art.
Performance wise, the game really surprised me. The load time on the Switch isn’t terrible, taking about thirty seconds to a minute to load into a run. Now at first you might think, well that really is a long time for a game like this to load. Well you would be right if it’s you’re first time playing and jumping into a run. Once you start playing the game and lasting longer, the more enemies the game tosses at you. At one point, the game had over five hundred enemies coming at me. Not only is that number of enemies impressive all at once, but also that the game didn’t slow down at all. Every enemy and your character have pixel perfect animation and movement. Given the games performance with everything going on really shows you just how much the game has been optimized for the Switch hardware.
Much like the graphics, the sound isn’t all that impressive either. That’s not to say that it’s not good, but it’s not earth shattering. The music in the game is alright, though I wish it was more consistent. It seems to drop out every once in awhile during long runs. But what you get is pretty good and fits the game well. Each enemy has their own sound effects and given the amount of enemies on the screen is also something that’s really impressive.
Scarlet Tower isn’t a unique game. I’ve played and covered games that are very similar to this one. But what the game brings to the genre is truly an amazing experience. The performance, graphics, music, and the sheer amount of enemies the game throws at you comes together to be the best game in it’s genre that I have ever had the opportunity to play.
If you’re looking for an action RPG rogue-lite, with tower defense like gameplay, you have to check out Scarlet Tower.
Disclaimer: A review key was provided
