Pizza Tower landed on my radar about 4 years ago, and it honestly entranced me. It's no secret that Nintendo has let quite a few of their franchises fall to the wayside over the years, but those franchises are old enough to have fans that are now willing to take matters into their own hands.

The artwork in this game is completely unhinged. Everything is overly detailed and animated in the best way possible. Peppino looks like he's going through 13 midlife crises at any given time. Truly, a man of the people. It's all fully animated in painstakingly detailed sprites, to boot! If I had it draw comparisons to anything, it would be the more out-there kinds of 90s animation; Stuff like Cartoon Network's "Cow and Chicken", or Nickelodeon's "Ren and Stimpy". It's definitely deliberate, seeing how every level starts with its own unique title card.

Heavily inspired by Wario Land 4, Peppino's moveset primarily consists of grabbing enemies with a melee attack, or dashing straight through them at Mach 4. The dash mechanics are this game's claim to fame, really. You can run up walls by jumping at them or using slopes, barreling through anything in your path. This game has hidden movement tech! Like, actual, godforsaken "Super Metroid shinespark" type movement tech, and it is endlessly fun to play around with. All the levels have a real sense of flow to them, reflected in the fact that there's a combo meter, score, and ranking system in place to reward players who learn the layouts. That's not to say you have to run past everything. Pizza Tower is littered with secrets, inside and outside the regular stages. Can't forget the iconic escape sequence at the end of each stage as well. Every single level is thematically unique, and throws its own unique mechanics into the mix. Part of me can never stop laughing at whatever new, absurd thing that the game decides to throw at me next. Grind rails? Sure! A chicken on my head? Why not!? A gun? Okay, maybe that's a bit too far, put the gun down, Peppino--PEPPINO, PUT DOWN THE GUN

The only genuine low point for me is the bosses. They are completely relentless, and a lot of the attacks you have to avoid can feel borderline random. Doesn't help that they're all twice as long as originally advertised; their health refills for a more frenetic round 2 once you knock off all their initial HP. It also hurts that the OST is just good. The stage music sounds great while I'm playing the stages themselves, but the only songs I can remember are the escape themes (the optional "Lap 2" theme absolutely rocks). It's a lot of fast paced synths, guitar, bass, and drums, and while each track is distinct, as a whole, they kinda blend together. (EDIT: What the fuck was I talking about here? The OST is incredible. Full stop.)

It delights me to no end that this game turned out the way it did. It started out looking like a Wario Land game, only to shift hard into its dash mechanics and gain an identity of its own. Its humor is cheesy, its content is beefy, there's a lot of love mixed into the sauce (at least, I hope to god that's just love I tasted), and it's been baked to perfection. It's pizza time.

I have been waiting for this game for SO FUCKING LONG. I've never even played Wario Land but after the SAGE demo and a couple patreon shit I was HOOKED by the game's momentum based platforming, large exploration levels, and uniquely charming and goofy art direction.

I am very pleased to say that all of this was carried and amplified in the full release. This game is so fucking awesome. I love the momentum based platforming and when I'm in a perfect flow state it makes me feel like I am the greatest gamer of all time. The collectibles and other elements of design are well handled, the combat is fun and helps feed into the flow, and the bosses are really fun!

The soundtrack is a bop and the ART STYLE OMG. The art style is incredibly charming with excellent Saturday morning cartoon style animations with a unique pixel art style as well. It gives the game a fun, unique identity. The only minor complaint I have with this game is with its mini games. They throw a lot of these at you and while some of them are all good, some seem to require precise platforming and reaction timing which was not what the character was built for.

Regardless, this game was WELL worth the wait and I am fully ready to play through it all over again.

What I Look For In a Life Partner: stereotypically Italian, makes pizza and knows how to perform a spinning piledriver.

You know what I'm tired of? Player characters who only do wimpy attacks like jumping on their enemies, or swiping with their dinky-ass little broadswords. What are ya gonna do with that buster sword? Tickle me to death? I'm here to grapple with every goddamn thing I see, and uppercut them through the ceiling straight into other enemies, initiating a combo and gaining points like an even more sadistic version of bowling. Like a demented pizza-making freight train I dash around colliding into everyone like an Ed Edd n' Eddy character straight outta Hell with nothing to lose. I do a sick body splash too. You see that stupid sunglasses-wearin' pineapple guy? I'm gonna beat the daylights outta him. I hate him! He ruins every pizza he touches! I'm gonna smash you into the ground Pineapple Man!!! BOOM! POW! SMACK!

BRUTALITY IS ME! I AM THE BRUTALIZER!

It kind of goes without saying what Pizza Tower is attempting to mimic. I mean, you know why I'm playing this, and I know why you're probably interested in it. Hell, it even has a golf stage perhaps as an allusion to the third game. Mario is jealous! He is so mad that Wario has better games than him! He can't take it anymore! He politicked to Nintendo and made Wario sit behind a desk to develop microgames for wee ant babies, while Mario continued to hog the spotlight! Denying us more pure Wario games with shoulder charging and butt smashing action! Say no more though, because a wacky Italian pizza chef straight out of some kind of What A Cartoon-ass 90s era CN show is here to deliver the good shit.

In the case of whether you're wondering if it pulls it off well, I personally think it passes with multiple flying colors of some sort. I would even go as far as to say it adds enough to become it's own identity regardless of it's painfully obvious inspiration. Peppino is a big-time brawler that I mesh with as well as tomato sauce and mozzarella, and just when you think the transformations are gonna start repeating they instead just keep cranking out more. Well, except near the end, they kinda go overboard on a certain one involving a semi-ranged weapon that people tend to hate in multiplayer. Still pastrami cool though, and it's gonna be really satisfying once you start making this game your main squeeze and master it to the nth degree.

THE CHECKLIST:
•Heavyweight character move-set with professional wrestling moves [X]
•Collecting shit, but not too much shit. [X]
•Blast Processing [X]
•Sick Boss Fights [X]
•Cartoon Aesthetic [X]

Yup, that's a bunch of boxes checked. Vee is in love maybe. Pizza Tower, I choo-choo-choose you to be my Valentine. Swoon

My new score attack obsession, I'm currently going through trying to achieve S ranks on every level. It's hard as hell but super rewarding, it feels great to know every level inside and out.

Controls take a little getting used to, you'll likely flop around a bit on your first playthrough, but once mastered, boy do they feel great. The sense of flow is incredible, probably the best of any 2D game I've played.

Also that soundtrack... holy hell. It's honestly one of the best for a game I've heard.

Pizza Tower is Wario Land unhinged in the best way possible. It is, no joke, one of the most satisfying and unique score attack platformers I have ever played. Banger music, some of these tracks are amazing. Peppino feels buttery smooth to control in an easy to learn but hard to master moveset. The animation is so fluid, and reminds me of an old nick cartoon. They really went out with the gross/ugly but charming in its own way art style wario land was known for and I wouldn't have it any other way. If wario land was shelved, I hope this is the start of the rise of wario-likes, because they are quite unlike anything I've ever played before.

As a big fan of Wario Land 4, I was extremely excited for this game as there really aren’t any games out there like that game specifically. There’s nothing quite like that game’s mix of exploration, usage of powerups, and extremely bizarre and creepy atmosphere. I kind of got that with Pizza Tower, but unfortunately I finished the game feeling a bit disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, the game is good. In fact, I’d highly recommend it. It’s just not exactly what I wanted and expected it to be. Due to its focus on speeding through every obstacle and enemy, requiring near perfect memorization of the level design for the highest ranks, it ends up feeling more like a very linear Sonic game rather than a Wario Land game.

There are definitely things that Pizza Tower absolutely nails. Controls are mostly perfect, with my main complaint being that your moveset is so large that I would often accidentally trigger moves I didn’t mean to, this mainly being a problem during boss fights. The weird and creepy vibe of the Wario Land games is here too, only having a more 90s/early 2000s cartoon flair to it. Music is very good too, although nothing stands out that much other than the Pizza Time and the pause menu song.

Where the game loses me is in its level design. The kind of 2D platformers that I tend to like and am more impressed by are the ones that involve more nonlinear exploration and secret finding rather than pure twitch reflexes and memorization. Stuff like Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario World, and, well, Wario Land 4 are more my style. This game straight up advertises itself as Wario Land inspired, and yet every level plays more like the escape sequences from Wario Land 4 only on crack. It’s very clear that you’re supposed to memorize the layout of every level and go through them as efficiently and quickly as possible, which just didn’t gel with me as much as I’d like. You can kind of play it at a slower pace, but that ends up making a lot of parts feel sluggish and annoying to get through. Your dash turns any enemy in your path into fodder, so why wouldn’t you constantly try to go as fast as possible?

The speed of the game in combination with its artstyle can be a bit problematic too because it’s sometimes way too hard to distinguish between things like background and foreground elements or even hazards/enemies. A good example of this are the electrical outlets that appear on the ground for one of the levels. When you’re going fast, these blend in way too much and it’s extremely hard to tell they’re even there. Hell, even the first level of the game has enemies that will literally spawn in front of you and slap your shit and stop you in your tracks before you realize what happened. These enemies are purple by the way, on a level with a background that’s a slightly different shade of purple.

These kind of issues made me understand why people dislike the 2D Sonic games. A complaint I’ve heard a lot about those games is that too often you’ll try to go fast and get constantly hit by enemies or hazards. The difference there is that Sonic games are usually designed well enough that even when you’re going really fast, it almost never feels like you’re going so fast that you can’t tell what you’re looking at on screen. Plus, the 2D Sonic games, despite also being momentum focused, have very wide open and big levels with multiple paths that makes replaying them over and over again extremely satisfying. You don’t really get that with Pizza Tower. There is one linear path to take. Playing the game at optimal efficiency basically turns the game into an autorunner. The developer apparently got a lot of feedback from people in a discord who pushed him into this specific speedrun niche, and it really shows.

The levels also end up feeling very samey because of this design philosophy. Sure there are different themes, like one is in the sewers, one in a castle, one in a literal warzone, etc. Ultimately this doesn’t really matter, because few of the levels have anything truly unique going on with them. A few towards the end throw in some gimmicks, like the FNAF level, but it’s too little too late and the gimmicks they have are more on the annoying side. It has remnants of the kind of powerups seen in Wario Land, but they feel tacked on, as if the game was going to incorporate them more but the dev just forgot about them as the game swerved into a different direction. In my mind, every level blends together a bit too much.

Boss fights felt jarring to me. This is a game where you literally cannot die in stages, with the only true failure state being running out of time during the rush back to the start of the level. Having the boss fights be as difficult as they were seemed like an odd decision, especially when they start filling the screen with random hazards that sometimes feel impossible to avoid. I’m not asking for the boss fights to be literally unloseable or something, it just didn’t feel like a natural difficulty progression. Oddly enough, I found the final boss a lot more interesting, fun, and less difficult than the others, probably because I was used to the difficulty at that point, but it simply felt better designed.

I’m being really hard on the game, but that’s mainly because I was looking forward to this for a while. It’s still well made and very good. Again, the controls are great, the art and animations are fantastic, and overall you can tell they put a lot of heart and soul into this. The level design isn’t quite what I wanted, but it’s definitely not bad by any means. There have been small patches for the game almost every day since release to fix issues, which shows that they genuinely care about feedback. I just don’t really feel much of an incentive to go back and replay levels due to the overall design rubbing me the wrong way. Going for S and P ranks also seems absurdly annoying, fuck that.

By the way, I unintentionally beat the game with 69% completion, so I’m never touching that save file again.

Cool vibes in this game all around. Love the MS Paint style, it might turn some people away but every frame of animation is a pleasure to look at. OST is full of bangers, can't think of one song I didn't like. Love the game's humor too from the visual gags in the animation when playing and the backgrounds to just general good pacing.
Just about every level has some unique gimmick/power up to throw at you which sounds like a big gaming red flag but it is honestly done so well and never kills the pacing, usually goes down to a puzzle to get rid of a power up you have because you can't get too far without it. Once you get the groove of the game it becomes very fast paced and running through levels. I think I had a big grin on my face throughout my entire playthrough
Didn't 100% to beat but will probably go back to try to.
Excellent platformer all-around. Wish Peppino Pizza was real I'd eat there every week

It is crazy how effortlessly they managed to capture the feel of Wario Land 4 here, hell it might even surpass it. Just an insanely varied and fun platformer with lavish animation and a banger soundtrack. It's crazy polished and pretty much the perfect length, and the final boss sequence in particular really cemented this as a new favorite 2D platformer.
Only things I can knock it on are that because the visual style is so evenly applied across the entire game it can become hard to read the environment, especially in some of the visually busier levels (parts of the gnome forest (?) in particular felt like the worst of this). I also think that while Gustavo and Brick add even more fun variety to an already insanely varied game, they somewhat lack that anxious manic energy that really gives the entire game its identity and feel a bit out of place as a result.
But man, this game rocked.

Großartiges Spiel. Es hat unfassbar Spaß gemacht es durchzuspielen, Movement ist mega geil und ich kam sehr schnell mit allen gut klar, trotz das alles teilweise unfassbar schnell ist. Der gesamte OST ist ne 10/10. Er ist funky, episch und einfach nur geil. Der gesamte Cartoon/Pixel Look ist unfassbar charmant und die Animationen sind viel zu gut. Alleine Peppino ist eine Klasse für sich. Die Boss Fights waren auch erstaunlich gut. Ich habe vorerst gedacht: "Wie kann man in so einem Game eigentlich gute Boss Fights machen?", doch das was geboten wurde war mega. Ich liebte es vor allem während der Boss Fights die Attacken zu parieren. Finale war ebenfalls mega episch und spaßig. Kann es definitiv weiterempfehlen

Worst panic attack of peppino's life

It's kinda Ace. It was the first of this suddenly upshoot in indie devs deciding they're sick of nintendo not making new Wario World games, but it's not just Wario World (pizza Theme), sorta hits a soft spot between wario world mechanics and the ideal of sonic going Really Fucking Fast. Peppino has a dedicated Full Fucking Sprint button as the core gameplay mechanic and most of the platforming will require using it in some way; and even if it doesn't sprinting is necessary to getting a good score anyways (the game's highest level rank requires both doing a level perfectly and doing it in one combo; good luck!). It takes some time to get used to the controls, he can be particularly unruly when you're really hitting that sprint but you'll find that trying to turn a car when you're going 150 mph is very difficult too, but once you get it you get it. And outside of the standard dash and job he has a pretty robust movelist; to the point where i got stuck a few times because I forgot he had a super jump. This happened to me multiple times, please don't ask.

Overall the levels are good; there's a handful i'm not super hot on (shoutouts to Golf) but none of them are so bad it killed it for me. Each level tends to their own gimmick of some kind, like making use of a new power ala wario world or The Threat Of A Nuclear Drop! look out! The game also has some pretty great bosses; i'm not super hot on the first boss but every other boss is really fun.

Aesthetically this game is also a complete slamdunk for me; I've always been a complete sucker for that High Detail MS Paint look, and this is a whole game of it. Without a doubt one of my favorite looking games in the past few years; just oozing with soul. The soundtrack is also full of slappers, probably one ost i'll be throwing into playlists for a while.

I guess I could complain about length? I dont really believe it's actually too short but i clocked in at 8 hours on steam and thats with a lot of AFKing, you can easily cut that down on a casual playthrough depending on how good you are/if you afk in game far less than I do.
I don't really think that's fair criticism; for example I didn't get every secret or S (and by extension, P) rank any level. The game is also clearly designed so you can speed run/score hunting. Sadly I don't have that tick in my brain that makes me want to score hunt/speed run, but if you have that tick there's a lot of extra hours to be squeezed out of Pizza Tower.

Pizza Tower rules. You should buy it. I think it's well worth the $20 base but if money's tight i'd atleast keep an eye on it for when sale season comes out.

This is really fun. Great game about running around very fast and walloping enemies--the movement feels wonderful once you get it down, though it's a little tricky to start.

I like the soundtrack quite a lot, has a lot going on and a bunch of different styles. An important thing this game gets right is that when, at the end of levels, you have to backtrack and escape them, the music is overridden by the escape theme, and the theme is really good and you don't get sick of it or miss the original level theme that much--a lot of games botch that, I think. The artstyle is a delight as well; I wanna say it's somewhere between a handful of 90s-early 2000s cartoons and the weird Czech episodes of Tom and Jerry? Doing it's own thing also though.

It's maybe a little too maximalist for me personally? I had to play it in 1-2 hour intervals because there's just so much going on it would wear me down a little, but I enjoyed it a lot all the same.

I struggle to think of any flaws with Pizza Tower, I legit think this is a perfect 5/5. The amount of control you have is nothing like I've played before and Peppino's movements feel both snappy and precise. Once you continuously replay the level and learn the ins and outs of it, finding the best route possible so that the 2nd lap of pizza time is much more easier on you is the best feeling. This is a game I cannot recommend enough, please support the dev for all the hard work and time it took to release this game. Alright guys I know the year just started but... I think this is my goty. Easily. Zelda you're gonna have to do pretty damn well to beat this one out. Just saying.

If Nintendo doesn't want to bring Wario Land back guess we'll have to do it ourselves.

First of all, I'd like to say that playing this game was a treat I enjoyed every second of it and it might even be one of my favorite indie games of all time. Though I do have a few complaints I'd like to share since Indie games tend to be protected from criticism nowadays.

This game is the most Wario Land type of game you can get in recent years with its deranged character design, unique soundtrack, and level design it has everything a Wario Land fan can fully enjoy even though it's not Wario Land. But it's not all Wario Land it's still its own thing and this is debatable whether they did it for the best or should've stayed with the standard platformer formula like Wario Land 4.

Guess I'll mention the obvious good stuff of the game, and yeah the soundtrack is really good, especially the "Hurry Up" theme (No idea if it's called like that but Wario Land 4 called it like that) which is basically the game theme. The art style is very unique with the quirky MS Paint look and the style of John Kricfalusi's artwork on Ren & Stimpy.

The gameplay is really really fun, it's like Wario Land 4 if you had to constantly keep running as if it was a Sonic game. This is where I find my big main issue with the game and it's in the level design, the level design itself is good and very fun to go through but this game still is designed like a Wario Land 4 game with secrets and stuff but you literally have no time to look for them since you just go really, really fast and slowing down just to look for secrets is not fun so honestly why bother right?
The second thing that deranged me with the level design is that most levels are about 10 minutes long but most of it go so fast you can't remember what is what and where is where and it makes things even more annoying if you care about finding every nooks and crannies or just exploring and remembering the stage.
My last issue is the scoring system being honestly just frustrating and too demanding, I love a difficult challenge but to get a Perfect rank requires just too much at a point where it's not really fun anymore. I can totally understand why one would love to do it because some people like different types of challenges than others but it's honestly not for me.
Though I'd like to note that I did all bosses on Perfect rank because it's just no damage and the bosses in this game are really fun pattern-learning bosses so I do recommend doing the Perfect rank on them.

To end this review I'd like to note that it's about 6-7 hours to complete and it's honestly a decent length for a game like that though more stages would've been welcomed.
Was it worth the wait? Absolutely.
Is it a worthy Wario Land 4 successor? I'd say yes even though it's different but most Wario Land games are different from each other so a new take on the base of Wario Land 4 was nice to see.
Is it worth its price? Yes, it is! 20€ is a really good price for this game.