Tower Unite

Pros

• A virtual world that you can customize to your liking
• A wealth of games drawn from a wide variety of genres

Cons

• Still very much a work in progress
• Different games vary in quality, and many are currently incomplete

Tower Unite is a game that takes a more is better approach to development, offering a truly extensive range of different activities to engage in. And although most of these diversions aren't especially deep in their own right, this is a game where the whole is better than the component parts. Tower Unite creates an impressive world that may not yet be fully fleshed out but which offers some interesting new takes on an aging formula and shows a whole lot of promise if the developers continue at the steady pace of updates they've been engaged in up until now.

Despite belonging to the genre of virtual world games like Second Life, Tower Unite can be more accurately seen as an open world amusement park. Tower Unite found its origins as a popular mod for the Garry's Mod tool kit, but moving to its own proprietary engine has allowed this game to develop into a more stable and fully balanced game in its own right. This new approach brings a few distinct advantages. Users can create their own servers and determine permissions for other players, so you can essentially make your own world where only friends are allowed. This also means that users can access their own condos whenever they want. These condos serve as something of a home base, allowing users to customize a living space that suits their personality and invite friends to come over and visit. Despite users having a decent amount of control over their servers, there are consistent systems in place in terms of currency so that there's a sense of balance regardless of what servers you decide to occupy.

While the ability to customize your condo and socialize with your friends is a nice bonus, the real meat of the experience is in the games themselves. These are characterized as "game worlds" and resemble the distinct sort of areas you'd find in a real world amusement park. There are currently nine different game worlds in operation, but the developers intend to continue adding more as the game develops. The depth and sophistication of these games are understandably varied in terms of quality, but most draw inspiration from popular and existing games. Virus, for instance, is inspired by the cult hit first person shooter Timesplitters 2, casting one player as a zombie who other players have to hunt but who can infect others by touching them. Other words are similarly inspired by games like Super Monkey Ball, mini golf, and top down arcade shooters.

Many of the worlds currently in existence are still in progress, and that's a value at the heart of the game. This is a work in progress, but updated are plentiful, and there's a lot of communication between the developers and the players. If you're looking for a big open world filled with games and likely to grow in the coming years, you may want to buy into Tower Unite while it's still young.

Pros

• A virtual world that you can customize to your liking
• A wealth of games drawn from a wide variety of genres

Cons

• Still very much a work in progress
• Different games vary in quality, and many are currently incomplete