An interesting idea that carries heavy flaws.

Play as an A.D.A.M., a hyper advanced android developed to be the war machine to end all war machines. Stuck in the titular tower, climb floor after floor of randomly generated dungeons, gather "Elixir Skin" (this game's currency) and weapons from fallen foes, and augment your body with an assortment of mutations from the weapons you've collected and upgrade your stats to hit harder and last longer. If you face defeat in battle, you respawn at the bottom floor, with only the ability to return to check-point floors.

Basically, an Extreme Sci-Fi Dark Souls long before even Demon's Souls was just a passing thought. It plays relatively well, but the movement physics feel a little off, as the ADAM you play as seems to almost slip and slide around the area while running.

Visuals are extremely repetitive, all enemies are ADAM (with various different gear set-ups and stats), and the game can be a bit unforgiving. Also, the story is paper thin, with the only real story beat you get at the very end of the game with one of its very few cutscenes

I won't lie. It's been quite a while since I've actually played this particular game, and I doubt I will ever play it again. Play this if you're absolutely curious over what one of Hudson's last games was like, but I honestly recommend you play the sequel instead, which is better in every respect.

an oddball "grasping towards Souls" title developed by neverland, best known for lufia and rune factory. there's a similar sort of interplay between loadout, upgrade currency, and death mechanics. see if you can spot where it falls apart.

1. you play as a robot that can be equipped with weapons/armor on your head, arms, chest, and legs. pressing the corresponding face button uses the equipment mapped to that body part, with the leg equipment being purely passive and not being mapped to a face button.
2. using equipment raises the heat gauge for that body part. when the gauge is full, the equipment is disabled until the gauge has fully drained. there is also a total usage limit for each weapon, which more or less acts as ammo.
3. double-tapping in any direction causes a roll or dash with full i-frames, and repeatedly tapping in the direction of a roll/dash continues it. each roll/dash raises the legs' heat gauge.
4. the game is arranged into a series of floors in a tower, with the full eradication of enemies on each floor leading to a boss fight that opens a portal to the next floor.
5. there's a single place to save, restore one's health/ammo, upgrade player stats, and equip weapons at the center of each floor.
6. upgrades are conducted via "elixir skin" you receive from killing enemies. health, defense, maximum heat gauge, and weapon slots can all be upgraded in this manner.
7. elixir can also be gained by "restoring" equipment, which basically removes them from your inventory in exchange for a set amount of elixir that depends on the equipment's rarity and strength.
8. killing enemies occasionally drops weapons as well, with certain weapon "combos" activating "overkill" after death that supposedly raises the drop rate.
9. upon death, the player is sent to the first floor of the tower, although all previously opened portals remain. enemies do reappear on previously cleared floors but are randomly distributed. all equipment is dropped as well and is permanently lost.

imagine playing a souls game where taking a death permanently removed all your equipment and forced you to scrounge for more. suffering a death would instantly disrupt your build, forcing you to cobble together a new build from whatever extra equipment you have stored. instead of soul grinding (which is generally unneeded given the importance of equipment on your abilities), you would have to grind back your old weapons, making every death a major setback in terms of time investment. sounds poorly constructed, right? rengoku does exactly that! what's more confusing is that souls and elixir are virtually identical in terms of mechanics, and having all of that dropped on death would be a much more interesting mechanic. you would have decisions to make in terms of cashing in your surplus weapons vs wasting time grinding or hoping that upcoming floors yield enough elixir in the process of clearing them out. it wouldn't necessarily elevate the game, but it would certainly be much more fair to the player and more thought-provoking than what rengoku puts you through, where losing a nice weapon can virtually eliminate your chances of clearing a floor without toiling on the floors below looking for a replacement. even the devs must have recognized this, as they explicitly allow you to keep your equipment upon dying to a boss, removing any penalty from death whatsoever. every other review I read for this admitted that they just save scummed upon death, and I naturally followed suit.

however, some of the other fromsoft-adjacent choices bring some mechanical appeal to this otherwise-unremarkable title. the equipment customization and variety is incredibly flexible in terms of restrictions on body location and how many slots each weapon takes up. with extra slots on a body part, additional weapons can be loaded in as backups in case the primary weapon runs out of ammo. using the limited elixir to determine the distribution of talents to each body part allows for some interesting questions: should one part get extra heat and slots? should one arm get extra heat and the other get slots to give the former a safe and consistent weapon and the latter a deadly but quick-to-overheat weapon? what about leveling up heat for chest armor or dodge capabilities? finding boss weaknesses through exploiting a relatively underutilized elemental system and observing the separate tactics of each involves repeated build customization a la armored core. this is augmented by the fact that every single solitary enemy in the game operates via the same build system that you do, including using the same equipment that you have access to. the dodge/roll is also exceptionally useful, as it not only is extremely responsive, but it also creates momentum that can be preserved while executing attacks if said attacks are buffered into the end of a roll or dodge. gliding around an enemy in sync with one another and narrowing down openings where one can unleash their weaponry feels fluid and rewarding thanks to the generous cancel windows for rolls juxtaposed with stiff, deliberate weapon animations.

unfortunately, each floor is "randomly generated" aka it pulls different dull rooms from a pool of ~20, duct-tapes them together, and stuffs enemies with randomized builds in them. what's more, the layouts are not changed on death; they stay exactly the same between deaths. clearing out each floor quickly becomes monotonous through the repeated room layouts and lack of curated encounters. what's more, the weapon balance is incredibly skewed in favor of guns, as individual bullets deal nearly as much damage as melee attacks with a rate-of-fire many times faster than a sword slash or hammer strike. the game opened as a somewhat challenging experience when I actually engaged with the melee combat, but it quickly became identical from enemy to enemy as soon as gatling/machine guns became available. up until the seventh floor (out of eight) you can shred anyone in your way just by DPS racing them with the gun, and the ability to go back to the save point, lock in your progress, and refill all your ammo for free makes it impossible for the game to ever prevent you from cheesing the game like this. of course, the permanent loss of equipment is supposed to counteract this, but consider that each enemy uses the same weapon pool you do, and by extension they also have access to gatling cannons and such that will instantly obliterate any melee-based build. thanks to this virtually any decent build will converge to primarily using guns if you want to compete on the mid-to-high range floors, and those who choose to play by the rules wrt death will be forced to scour lower floors for guns in a game with sparse enemy spawns on cleared floors and low weapon drop rates. it doesn't help that using a particular class of weapon (for example: Bullet) levels up your damage output for said weapon, further pushing your build in favor of whatever weapons you most often kill enemies with. given how quickly guns mow down enemies, it's likely that you will quickly gain even further DPS buffs for said weapon(s), making them even more attractive.

that being said, the groove of combat in the later areas where enemies can live longer than a few seconds benefits greatly from the intuitive, smooth control scheme and variety of different enemy types you'll encounter. it helps that the bosses tend to get exclusive weapons that spices up their particular encounters and makes reaching one a bit more exciting than the usual grind. this was fun for about three hours, upon which I reached the top of the tower and was instantly booted back to the bottom to restart again. yep, to reach the true final boss you have to play through the game again, and the layouts seem more or less identical to how they were on the first playthrough. surprisingly, there's a completely new weapon pool to work with, giving those interested in further experimenting with their kit some juice to keep on playing (while enemies deal plenty of damage thanks to this, some of them have suspiciously low HP values indicating that the full range of "hard mode" buffs may not have been properly implemented). I did two full floors including bosses on this repeat run out of due diligence and was disappointed to find that said bosses had barely changed at all from the first run. even finding online information at all on the second run is difficult; the one gamefaqs guide lists only weapons for the first run, and I didn't read any reviews that mention a second run at all. I'm not getting anything more out of this game, so I'm happy to just call it here and maybe move onto the sequel in the future.