Tower of Peace

Описание: Verdict: Exceptionally Strong (8/10)

Much like Tower of Funny Thoughts, this tower is exceptionally strong and what a lot of it boils down to are all the tunnels. There are a ton of thin tunnels and segmented parts to this tower that work really well at dividing up the gameplay; this culminates in the climatic floor 10 where you have a gauntlet of various sections each with their own concept. It is highly memorable and extremely strong design.

This tower has a lot of really nice things going for it. Outside of the tunnels, we have stuff like the straight sections with conveyors and the large balls on the outside. I really don't get why JTOH players freak out over balls, I like the variety from normal parts and you should be able to handle balls if you can handle Mega Fun Obby. It is a very basic outside, but being large balls instead of large normal platforms is the difference between something I like and something that would be more filler oriented. I think I have a strong bias towards round platforms. Put more round things in the game, especially on outsides.

There is also stuff like the large spinning platform and the spinning sections on the outside, scary stuff for a beginning player and certainly quite a nice aesthetic. Even the beginning with its cross spinning platforms is quite a nice little aesthetic. I find this tower just has a great amount of appealing stuff to it along with straightforward gameplay.

The music, My god, the music in this is quite strong. We have a song from Deathly Hallows, a song from Oneshot, a song from Adventure Time, a song from DDLC, a song from Thomas the Tank Engine, and a grand finale with Megalovania. That just is a really good lineup, the songs are incredibly varied here and I will say that many of the songs work quite well in building a peaceful atmosphere that also has some degree of suspense to it, once again finishing with a grand finale song that works wonders.

This is a really good tower. So good in fact I would definitely consider it the best thing we have done. The stakes are much higher than Tower of Buttons with that final momentum jump (even if nobody ever does it normally) and with the ability to easily die from floor 9. I am more likely to struggle beating this tower than several higher Hard towers due to those two floors and the trickiness they can offer. Steeple of Pursuit is a good speedrun, but it cannot have the sort of variety I would really want. This has always stood out as one of those definitive towers that belongs in the upper spheres of stuff I enjoy.

I should however say that this is just Exceptionally Strong and nothing higher. The tunnels throughout this do lead to a very forgiving nature, maybe a bit too forgiving. The bigger issue though is music zones; there are a couple places where you go high enough on a floor that you enter the next music zone. Your Reality is used so little in towers and it is a shame to hear it start and stop twice because the middle portion goes into the next floor. This happens several times throughout the tower as well; it just isn't the best design decision.

There is also the flaw that there is a couple floors with Kirby and a floor with Mario. These floors end up being the weaker floors musically. Of course the one source that the tower would take multiple songs from would be Kirby. It really is a shame, the Kirby stuff definitely feels like filler.

This tower is just really strong. It is probably the tower I would point to when talking about tunnels and how they can be used to build tension or to segment up gameplay. Both are done really well here. The music is also really impressive, there is just a number of songs here you just won't hear in other towers and makes this a unique experience. Even with the small nitpicks, it is easily the best thing we have done and definitely a sign of towers being able to get even better than what we have seen.