The Tower on the Borderland Review (Steam)

by Jim Smale · Published May 17, 2024 · Updated May 13, 2024

The Tower on the Borderland Review, A horror game inspired by Super Metroid and The House on the Borderland. Explore, survive and escape from a mysterious tower, inhabited by ghouls and monsters.

The Tower on the Borderland Review Pros:

Beautiful graphics style that invokes PlayStation 1 era games.
440.87MB download size.
Graphics settings – fullscreen.
Full controller support.
3rd person action-adventure gameplay.
Tutorial pop-ups as you play.
The map fills in as you explore and adds points of interest.
Ranged and melee combat.
You are free to explore where and how you like.
Full 3D game world with 360-degree camera control.
Tense atmosphere that gets a lot of help from the s
Excellent sound work.
The game will save you when you complete a mission.
The map updates as you go and you can zoom in and out of it.
You get given mission objectives and can view them in the pause menu.
Camera settings – Invert the Y axis and set the camera sensitivity. Toggle camera aim from free aim to lock on.
Damage values – on or off.
It is a lot of fun to play.
Death just resets you back to the last life-giving urn thing that also has a radio playing license-free music.
Lock on to make combat a bit easier.
You have a radio that when used brings up a huge dial that you then rotate to try and get a signal.
The minimalist approach to the story and everything going on in the game only adds to its intrigue.
In-game cutscenes and interactions.
Falling off the side of the tower resets you back where you were and you lose some health.
The goal of the game is to scale this huge tower and to do that you need to take out these bosses to satisfy the nightmare to allow you up to the top.
Such a cool place to just explore and experience and it owes a lot to the graphic style and color scheme.
Hidden shiny spirit bugs to kill/collect.
Auto grapple on ledges.
Interactive icons show so you know if you can climb ledges or search for people etc.
Many enemy types.
Uses the Metroidvania mechanic as over time you will need to go back to old areas to unlock new paths or find something you need.

The Tower on the Borderland Review Cons:

Cannot remap controls.
No Steam achievements.
The melee combat takes a lot of getting used to, it’s almost rhythmic in that you have to time hits and dodges.
The map gets very hard to read especially when dealing with multi layer layouts.
No actual graphics settings.
Doesn’t tell you that reloading a gun swaps out the mag and discards any bullets left in the previous mag.
The game doesn’t always do a good job of telling you what to do or where to go.
Lock on is huge and the icon itself does get in the way when facing multiple enemies.
The camera can just randomly mess up and go all over the place.
You cannot lock on to enemies that are resting or sitting down.
Fall damage is fine but the Fall height seems to be one height one minute then another one the next.
When tutorial text pops up it stops you from being able to shoot or melee enemies so bad placement of those really messes you up.

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