Topple Tower - Tower Building

I have... mixed feelings about this title. The presentation is probably the greatest aspect; the music is awesome (I had never heard of Nomyn before but now I have!), the art is gorgeous, the effects are smooth (or at least as smooth as they can be on my current potato), and the menu is attractively stylish, even if the fonts and buttons could be way bigger and scale according to screen resolution.

The biggest problem, though, is the gameplay. Nowhere does it say in any description or help menu that you exclusively lay down blocks by pressing the space bar; even left-clicking does nothing. The instructions also didn't say anything about the next block forming exclusively from the sides of the last-placed block; at first, I thought it would randomly pick a joint from all parts of your structure. Another issue is the lack of an exit button; making gamers have to physically press Alt+F4 to close the game feels... unnatural.

But the core issue is just understanding weight distribution. I have no idea of how my structure was able to stay as long as it could, as I basically made an upwards spiral with no visible leaning until its sudden end. So it was confusing for me to see it finally fall when I was simply mashing the space bar immediately upon spawn almost half the time as I got irritated by the lack of predictability of the structure's sway, especially since the yellow blocks are effectively a trap that is simply better off being avoided, because you would ideally want to use a bomb to destroy an accidental outcropping that could topple the tower, yet it might drop a bunch of blocks there instead and cause the very thing you intended to avoid—and there's no way to know which it'll be, so it would be way better to not make it guesswork and simply color bomb blocks red or something, if not show an actual bomb icon.

Given the description, I thought it would be a truly zen, fully turn-based, not real-time, quick-reaction, block-builder. I feel like a better implementation of this kind of concept would be to turn it into some kind of card-based roguelite with tower cards of different weights and types: like, when you place and are restricted to the last placed block, it could show you 3 out of 30 possible types of cards of different weight and you'd be forced to pick between them. Roguelikes are all the rage these years so this would probably be exponentially more popular.

This game is also falsely tagged "tower defense," but it would be interesting if, say, there were machine-gun blocks that would actually fight off flying invaders which would add way more sophistication and strategy to the card selection pool: see how many waves you can last defending your tower (which would just be on flat ground or atop a mountain, not suspended in mid-air), or something like that, like maybe a space station that you could modularly build out, where gravity doesn't matter too much, with shield generators, oxygen levels, possibly even crew and passageways for them to easily reach turrets, etc.

All in all, while the presentation is solid, I think the simplistic and aggravatingly unpredictable one-button gameplay does a great disservice relative to what a game like this could magnificently be—and I'd be very interested in trying that, if it were ever to be realized.

Hi guys I tried this game and had a blast. Definitely download!🥇