Reviewed by Brandy Shaul
Tower Bloxx is apparently a fairly popular PC and iPhone game; so popular in fact, that Digital Chocolate felt compelled to transfer the title to the Xbox Live Arcade, and to tack on a $10 price tag.
Unfortunately, the game falls pretty short at its goal of becoming a must-have, allowing you to see virtually everything the game has to offer within the first ten minutes. The storyline is an expected “our town is dwindling – we need a hero to revitalize it” plea for help from the player, placing you in the role of a city builder who must pick and choose where to place multi-colored towers, one floor, or block at a time.
Gameplay is incredibly simplistic. You click on a square on the city map, and are taken to an empty lot in town, where you proceed to press the A button a few dozen times, timing the placement of each floor onto the tower.
As you build the tower, pieces dangle from a string at the top of the screen, and the tower itself sways back and forth in the wind, becoming more aggressive in its movements as the tower grows in height. Depending on the game mode (Quick Play, Time Attack or Build a City), you are given a varying level of leeway in terms of how many floors you can miss before your tower ends and you are given your score.
If you can appropriately place the correct number of floors, the tower ends by you placing a roof on your structure. Afterwards, you are given a score based on how many “perfect” floor placements you made (that is, how many blocks you placed in perfect alignment with the block below), which in turn grants you a larger number of new citizens in your town.
In terms of both the Quick Play and Time Attack modes, that’s essentially the long and short of the game. In the Build a City mode, there is an added level of complexity in that different colored towers have different heights and build requirements (red towers must be built next to a blue tower and so on), and that as you progress, new content is unlocked – block pieces with balconies, different colored towers, new building locations and so on.
The game itself is fairly visually appealing, with the town’s backdrop changing appropriately as your tower reaches the height of clouds, or even outer space, and the rapid addition of citizens who zoom into your towers via umbrella-powered flight after each floor is placed.
There are a few extras thrown in to help flesh out the package, like the ability to look inside a tower piece as you build it, and view citizens sitting in their homes reading the newspaper or other mundane tasks, but this is more like an afterthought than anything that helps make the game more desirable.
Aside from the real lack of excitement that Tower Bloxx Deluxe brings to the table, there is a striking oversight in terms of the multiplayer component. While the game supports up to four players locally, there is no online multiplayer. While the ability to either work cooperatively or compete against friends still wouldn’t have made the title a must-purchase, it still should have been added, simply to add some replayability to a title that is downright bland without it.
In the end, Tower Bloxx Deluxe is one title that probably should have stayed on the computer/phone spectrum of the gaming marketplace. Casual titles like these are great when played in very short sessions, but as a console experience, competing against so many other puzzle and platform games that do it so much better, Tower Bloxx Deluxe simply can’t compete.
Special thanks to Rebecca Tran and Digital Chocolate for providing a copy of this title.