izigame.me

TL;DR: Pizza Tower is an amazing platformer. The music is awesome, every single pixel of the game just BREATHES with personality and charisma, and each level is PACKED with content, allowing for endless replayability (there's also an entirely separate second campaign with a new, moderately altered character). It's fun, fast, and feels so good to play once you get good at it.
I bought Pizza Tower a couple of months ago, way after the hype of the release where everyone was talking about it. It stayed in my wishlist for a good while until I actually decided to give it a shot.
I then bought the game, played through its entirety... and it was okay?
I mean, the game wasn't bad, it definetly had a lot of personality, the visual style is something I've never seen before and the music is a really high point of the experience, but the gameplay wasn't really all that enjoyable. It was fast, but it all just felt kinda mixed together as I was playing level after level. I uninstalled and moved on, thinking of it as a weird, overall negative experience.
That was my entire experience with Pizza Tower until a couple of weeks ago when I watched an essay-style video talking about the game and it kinda made me wanna give it another shot. Idk, maybe I missed something? Maybe I went through the game way too fast, and it had a lot more to show me?
Yes, yes, and also yes.
You see, the thing that makes Pizza Tower special are the levels. To be more specific, how replayable each level is.
When I was playing through the first levels for a second time, things felt different. I was already used to the mechanics, used to controlling Peppino, so going through each level was a lot smoother, and since I still remembered some of the layouts, I didn't need to stop as much, there was this unnatural but welcoming flow to the whole thing that wasn't present the first time.
And that's when it clicked for me: Pizza Tower's strength comes from its replayablity.
Don't get me wrong, the game is not bad if you just play through it, it's fast, it's charming, it's extremely varied in content, but to me, the best thing about it is that every single level, even the almost-tutorial level that is John Gutter to the ones following it is filled with interesting collectibles, secrets and mechanics.
Playing through any given level is pretty easy. You can't really die, you always respawn at a nearby checkpoint and your main objective is pretty obvious. After you reach the "end" of a level, you're required to do the whole thing again, except now it's in reverse and you're on a timer (also the music goes fuckin bonkers), which is NOT something the game forces into you until the second half, the game makes it clear that it's okay to take your time.
Basically, there isn't much of a challenge in just playing through the game.
After you leave, your points are calculated and you can move on to the next level.
Now, if you really did that and just went on to play whatever came next, you'd be doing the game (and yourself) some huge injustice. Because not only are there SO MANY things a single level can provide, but since you just played that level, going through that is going to be much, much smoother.
But why exactly would you wanna keep playing the same level? Well, for starters, whenever you finish a level, your rank is calculated based on your perfomance. That alone can be incentive enough to go back and try again, no one wants to move on to the next level after getting a passing C, get back there and show them who's boss! Now, that rank can be increased by playing better, and how do you do that? You get more points, which you get by collecting the things the game offers you, like the many pizza toppings spread across the stage, or the many secrets hidden around, of which there are usually four: Three secret levels and one hidden treasure. Finding those secret levels isn't always easy and you'll need to know the map layout if you're looking for a full completion, and playing those secret levels usually gives the player a specific platforming challenge. Some of them are also hidden in the timed portion of the level, which encourages you to be precise and avoid unnecessary time losses.
But that's not all, because not only does the game force you to backtrack the level so you can actually escape and move on, the game ALSO gives you the option to redo the whole level AGAIN, for even more points, BUT you need to it within the time limit, which carries on from your previous lap. So if you spent to long getting back to the beggining the first time, you might need to run if you wanna make it a SECOND one.
All of that comes together to allow you to go above the regular ranks and instead of getting a "nice" A Rank, you can get a precious shiny S RANK. S Ranks are awesome, they require you to do EVERYTHING a level has to offer, in one single attempt.
If you get every secret and every collectible along with enough points in the end, then your mastery over that level has been proven and you've proved once and for all that you're the boss.
It blew my mind to see how much my enjoyment of any given level improved just by playing it again. Because it wasn't just me being able to play the level faster, it was about getting all of those nice collectibles, AND THEN the S Rank, and S Ranks are awesome because you can't rush any of them. You need to know what the level looks and feels like, so you gotta play it once or twice. Then you need to get the secrets, which might also take two or three attempts without online help, THEN you need to see if you have enough speed to do the second lap and get those extra points. Finally, after all of that has been done, you can bring all of that knowledge and skill together and get yourself a tasty S Rank.
Not just that, but you can then use that knowledge to get the achievements for that level which also feel pretty amazing.
All of that goes to show awesome Pizza Tower's level design and gameplay is, that game rewards you for puttin in effort, which is something many games forget to do these days.
Pizza Tower is an amazing game, which I'm glad I gave another shot to. I don't really need to recommend it, because the Internet did that already two years ago, but I'm here to say that it's not just a funny game about a silly italian making poses and whatnot, it's a masterpiece of game design, that brings the old school feel of arcade platformers to the modern area, with not just an amazing track but also a pretty fun and fast gameplay.