Project Tower Review — Not So Mighty Morphin’

Project Tower is a platforming puzzle game with some third-person shooter combat. Levels are presented as straightforward, easy-to-follow paths where players solve platforming-based puzzles with unique mechanics while occasionally engaging enemies, fighting bosses, and exploring the level’s unique environment before moving on to the next challenge. The game emphasizes morphing, the thematic way it presents its mechanics, as well as the unfolding story as you scale each level of the tower.

Project Tower’s story follows a faceless human survivor of a planetary invasion of Earth. The alien invaders capture the protagonist and subject them to the Tower, a series of replicated environments and challenges designed to gather research data for their armies. To earn your freedom, you must scale to the top of the tower, proving yourself by besting increasingly difficult challenges along the way.

Each level is linear and visually stunning, taking advantage of the game’s unique setting and premise to showcase a variety of environments based on alien planets. You’ll go from squirming through a concrete maze to shivering in the cold snow and swimming through an exotic alien ocean, all simulated by your tower prison. As you progress, the story unfolds through engaging cutscenes. While the voice acting is a bit rough in some areas, the directing is excellent and makes great use of the game’s impressive settings for striking visuals.

While your alien captors provide you with sci-fi weapons, your most powerful tool is the ability to morph. By collecting data from different enemies encountered in the tower, you gain the ability to transform into them at will, allowing you to overcome obstacles and battle foes using extraterrestrial powers beyond human capability.

The morphing ability is the game’s main selling point and the feature most likely to appeal to potential players. It’s certainly what caught my attention. After giving the game a thorough playthrough, I can admit it’s a cool mechanic but one that feels underutilized.

As mentioned, the levels in Project Tower are fairly straightforward. Unless you’re in a maze, you mostly follow a clearly defined path. You’ll encounter enemies, platforming challenges, and puzzles along these paths. Some challenges can be solved as a human, but others require abilities beyond your natural capabilities.

This is where morphing comes in. By transforming into a previously slain creature, you use their unique traits to traverse obstacles. While thematically cool, the creatures essentially provide specific movement abilities or powers to solve a puzzle—like dragging a cube you couldn’t move before or jumping across a gap.

This, of course, would be fine on its own if not for the way the game partitions your ability to morph into these different aliens or objects. The issue lies in how the game restricts your ability to morph. You’re given access to a specific form just before a puzzle that requires it, and the ability is removed once the puzzle is complete. You can’t hold on to collected forms or freely morph between them. Instead, the mechanic feels like a tool handed out momentarily and then taken away.

This effectively means that the game’s exciting morphing mechanic is just a really interesting way to package movement abilities you can use in the short term. Your ability to morph feels less like a powerful gift and more like… a convoluted ticket or key used to traverse a gap or move a cube and then taken away.

It should have been something you could do at will to emphasize the potential of the game’s morphing feature. Collect a form and use it whenever you want. Allow the ability to morph to feel like a true power, not a gimmick handed to you when you temporarily need your character’s stats to change for a puzzle. Let me turn into the dinosaur from two levels ago to fight a boss. It was disheartening to repeatedly see the “can’t morph here” popup when trying to use the so-called “power” in many areas of the game or to lose a cool new form after transitioning to the next level.

I understand this approach was likely intended to showcase a variety of alien forms quickly, but I strongly feel the morphing ability would be far more engaging if the game were designed around retaining forms collected throughout the experience rather than introducing a new alien or two for each level’s navigation.

I briefly mentioned boss fights earlier, and I’ll say that these are something the game executes well. Project Tower features some well-designed bosses, incorporating an almost bullet-hell style of gameplay that requires you to track and dodge numerous projectiles simultaneously. Some bosses allow or even require using the last form you collected before entering, but most are better handled by focus-firing their glowing weak spots with your human-form weapons.

Overall, Project Tower is a decent game, but its main selling point feels more gimmicky than a fully realized mechanic. It lacks a sense of freedom, which can make the experience feel like you’re being railroaded through what, at times, feels more like a tech demo than a game. At $25, Project Tower runs a little short, clocking in at around five hours, but you can beat it faster if you know what you’re doing.

The game is worth checking out, but it ultimately leaves something to be desired. Its flagship mechanic feels more like an unfulfilled promise.

Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Project Tower is available on Steam and PlayStation.