Nintendo’s Wario Land series has always occupied a unique niche in the company’s extensive catalogue with its weird humour and unconventional approach to platforming tropes, which is why fans have been greatly let down by the fact that there hasn’t been a new entry in over 15 years. To fill the gap, an indie team called Tour De Pizza came out early last year with its own spiritual successor called Pizza Tower, offering a polished and thrilling adventure into a truly insane food-themed world. Since release, Pizza Tower has quickly built up a high reputation for its creativity and gameplay design, and now that it’s come to Switch, we’re pleased to report that it is indeed a fantastic platformer.
Pizza Tower places you in the role of Peppino Spaghetti, the chef and owner of a failing pizzeria who finds himself threatened by an evil sentient pizza named Pizzaface who lives nearby in the titular tower. Pizzaface has a laser on top of the tower which he’s going to use to destroy Peppino’s pizzeria, so our daring chef dashes off to climb the tower and destroy the evil pizza and his minions once and for all.
Pizza Tower follows a simple 2D platforming template, as you explore self-contained levels packed with enemies, secrets, and collectibles. Peppino is quite a nimble protagonist, and his varied array of jumps, dashes, and dives lends a lot of technical depth to your ability to slide through levels and smoothly cruise around obstacles. You won’t necessarily need to learn all the nuances of this movement tech if your goal is simply to collect the five “toppins” hidden in each level, but as you eventually come around to understand, there’s a lot more complexity to learn and master in Pizza Tower if you want to go for full completion.
Borrowing strongly from Wario Land 4, the ‘end’ of every stage requires you to knock down a pillar (named John, for some reason) which then triggers a panic-inducing countdown and a subsequent rush to return to the level’s door back at the beginning. Sometimes this rush takes you back through the route you initially took through the level, while others you’re funnelled down brand-new routes that only open for the return trip. Either way, we loved how tense these segments are and how they can flip a level on its head. And those of you who are really confident in your abilities can opt to go through a portal that’ll put you through an even tougher second lap.
To keep things from getting stale, Pizza Tower does a magnificent job of keeping you guessing by constantly introducing new power-ups and gimmicks that notably change up how you approach gameplay. One memorable stage sees you playing mini golf with some cheese ball characters, while another gives you a chicken named Mort who grants you a double jump and a new melee attack. You’re still always following the central idea of collecting toppins and making your way towards the pillar, but you can expect at least one cool new idea out of almost every level.
Based purely on the merits of its level variety and gameplay gimmicks, Pizza Tower is already pretty great, but what takes it to the heights of being excellent is the inclusion of the scoring system. Every enemy you defeat or collectible you snag will increase your score, while defeated enemies will also boost your combo meter, and maintaining this meter is essential to getting the highest scores possible on a stage. Chasing those high scores, particularly to attain the coveted P-Rank, reveals a level of depth to the gameplay and the sheer brilliance of Pizza Tower’s gameplay design.
As you retry levels and push for a better score, you gradually start to see how carefully each stage’s layout is designed for speedrunning. Enemies that previously seemed randomly placed are now clearly there to help you keep your combo going, while a part of a level that once felt awkward to navigate is revealed to be perfectly shaped for a specific string of jumps and dives as you zip through it. Some stages will leave you scratching your head as you wonder how you could possibly hit the P-rank score, but diligently practising the tough sections and thinking outside the box will eventually reveal the way to chain together that one flawless run. In this way, P-rank attempts feel almost akin to a rhythm game in the sense of how you come to memorise the stage layouts and learn how to expertly time inputs. And finally pulling off that perfect run is a euphoric experience.
Suffice it to say, it isn’t often that you see a platformer that encourages chasing this level of mastery of its mechanics, and it’s endlessly rewarding to see how tightly and thoughtfully designed each stage is. Of course, you don’t have to chase the highest scores if your skills just aren’t up to the task, but for those who want the challenge, you’ll find layers upon layers to Pizza Tower’s design that fuel a wonderfully addictive rush to try doing just a little better.
As for its presentation, Pizza Tower employs a memorable and utterly ridiculous art style that looks like a cancelled ’90s Nickelodeon cartoon by way of MS Paint. There’s a delightfully janky and unrefined style to the animation and spritework here, as you navigate a gross and goofy world of living food. Much like how each level features new gameplay mechanics, you can also look forward to radically different stage elements and background art in each level that add a lot to the chaotic atmosphere. This is the kind of game that feels like a middle school kid’s notebook doodles brought to life in the best of way; we genuinely haven’t seen anything like this before.
Perfectly matching the madcap visuals is a soundtrack that provides an eclectic combination of chiptune, house, jazz, drum and bass, and rock. The sheer variety on offer with this music is truly impressive, and it all manages to maintain the anxious and crazy pace at which the gameplay typically moves.
The only complaint we have with Pizza Tower, and we’re reaching here, is that the boss fights could have used a little more work. Mastering these is still satisfying in much the same way as mastering the main levels, but there were many instances where it felt like it leaned a little too far into RNG territory, making things more frustrating than they ought to be. Still, the boss fights are a relatively small part of the whole package, and it could be argued that they feel ‘off’ only because of the incredible polish elsewhere.
Conclusion
Pizza Tower is the rare sort of game that improves on its inspiration in nearly every way, building upon many of Nintendo’s Wario Land ideas with impressive results. This is an incredibly satisfying, creative, and addictive platformer that’ll keep you busy for a long time if you want to 100% it. We’d highly recommend this to anyone who loved the old Wario Land games, or to anyone who’s looking for a new platformer with a high skill ceiling and lots of technical depth. Pizza Tower has definitely got it where it counts – platformers don’t get much better than this.
Nintendo’s Wario Land series has always occupied a unique niche in the company’s extensive catalogue with its weird humour and unconventional approach to platforming tropes, which is why fans have been greatly let down by the fact that there hasn’t been a new entry in over 15 years. To fill the gap, an indie team called Tour De Pizza came out early last year with its own spiritual successor called Pizza Tower, offering a polished and thrilling adventure into a truly insane food-themed world. Since release, Pizza Tower has quickly built up a high reputation for its creativity and gameplay design, and now that it’s come to Switch, we’re pleased to report that it is indeed a fantastic platformer.
Pizza Tower places you in the role of Peppino Spaghetti, the chef and owner of a failing pizzeria who finds himself threatened by an evil sentient pizza named Pizzaface who lives nearby in the titular tower. Pizzaface has a laser on top of the tower which he’s going to use to destroy Peppino’s pizzeria, so our daring chef dashes off to climb the tower and destroy the evil pizza and his minions once and for all.
Pizza Tower follows a simple 2D platforming template, as you explore self-contained levels packed with enemies, secrets, and collectibles. Peppino is quite a nimble protagonist, and his varied array of jumps, dashes, and dives lends a lot of technical depth to your ability to slide through levels and smoothly cruise around obstacles. You won’t necessarily need to learn all the nuances of this movement tech if your goal is simply to collect the five “toppins” hidden in each level, but as you eventually come around to understand, there’s a lot more complexity to learn and master in Pizza Tower if you want to go for full completion.
Borrowing strongly from Wario Land 4, the ‘end’ of every stage requires you to knock down a pillar (named John, for some reason) which then triggers a panic-inducing countdown and a subsequent rush to return to the level’s door back at the beginning. Sometimes this rush takes you back through the route you initially took through the level, while others you’re funnelled down brand-new routes that only open for the return trip. Either way, we loved how tense these segments are and how they can flip a level on its head. And those of you who are really confident in your abilities can opt to go through a portal that’ll put you through an even tougher second lap.
To keep things from getting stale, Pizza Tower does a magnificent job of keeping you guessing by constantly introducing new power-ups and gimmicks that notably change up how you approach gameplay. One memorable stage sees you playing mini golf with some cheese ball characters, while another gives you a chicken named Mort who grants you a double jump and a new melee attack. You’re still always following the central idea of collecting toppins and making your way towards the pillar, but you can expect at least one cool new idea out of almost every level.
Based purely on the merits of its level variety and gameplay gimmicks, Pizza Tower is already pretty great, but what takes it to the heights of being excellent is the inclusion of the scoring system. Every enemy you defeat or collectible you snag will increase your score, while defeated enemies will also boost your combo meter, and maintaining this meter is essential to getting the highest scores possible on a stage. Chasing those high scores, particularly to attain the coveted P-Rank, reveals a level of depth to the gameplay and the sheer brilliance of Pizza Tower’s gameplay design.
As you retry levels and push for a better score, you gradually start to see how carefully each stage’s layout is designed for speedrunning. Enemies that previously seemed randomly placed are now clearly there to help you keep your combo going, while a part of a level that once felt awkward to navigate is revealed to be perfectly shaped for a specific string of jumps and dives as you zip through it. Some stages will leave you scratching your head as you wonder how you could possibly hit the P-rank score, but diligently practising the tough sections and thinking outside the box will eventually reveal the way to chain together that one flawless run. In this way, P-rank attempts feel almost akin to a rhythm game in the sense of how you come to memorise the stage layouts and learn how to expertly time inputs. And finally pulling off that perfect run is a euphoric experience.
Suffice it to say, it isn’t often that you see a platformer that encourages chasing this level of mastery of its mechanics, and it's endlessly rewarding to see how tightly and thoughtfully designed each stage is. Of course, you don’t have to chase the highest scores if your skills just aren’t up to the task, but for those who want the challenge, you’ll find layers upon layers to Pizza Tower’s design that fuel a wonderfully addictive rush to try doing just a little better.
As for its presentation, Pizza Tower employs a memorable and utterly ridiculous art style that looks like a cancelled '90s Nickelodeon cartoon by way of MS Paint. There’s a delightfully janky and unrefined style to the animation and spritework here, as you navigate a gross and goofy world of living food. Much like how each level features new gameplay mechanics, you can also look forward to radically different stage elements and background art in each level that add a lot to the chaotic atmosphere. This is the kind of game that feels like a middle school kid’s notebook doodles brought to life in the best of way; we genuinely haven’t seen anything like this before.
Perfectly matching the madcap visuals is a soundtrack that provides an eclectic combination of chiptune, house, jazz, drum and bass, and rock. The sheer variety on offer with this music is truly impressive, and it all manages to maintain the anxious and crazy pace at which the gameplay typically moves.
The only complaint we have with Pizza Tower, and we’re reaching here, is that the boss fights could have used a little more work. Mastering these is still satisfying in much the same way as mastering the main levels, but there were many instances where it felt like it leaned a little too far into RNG territory, making things more frustrating than they ought to be. Still, the boss fights are a relatively small part of the whole package, and it could be argued that they feel 'off' only because of the incredible polish elsewhere.
Conclusion
Pizza Tower is the rare sort of game that improves on its inspiration in nearly every way, building upon many of Nintendo’s Wario Land ideas with impressive results. This is an incredibly satisfying, creative, and addictive platformer that’ll keep you busy for a long time if you want to 100% it. We’d highly recommend this to anyone who loved the old Wario Land games, or to anyone who’s looking for a new platformer with a high skill ceiling and lots of technical depth. Pizza Tower has definitely got it where it counts - platformers don’t get much better than this.
