When comparing The Cave vs TowerFall Ascension, the Slant community recommends TowerFall Ascension for most people. In the question“What are the best local co-op PC games?” TowerFall Ascension is ranked 1st while The Cave is ranked 40th. The most important reason people chose TowerFall Ascension is:
You run, jump, and shoot arrows, which anyone can learn in a matter of minutes. To become a great player, however, there is a lot of technique and strategy to learn. This includes aiming, using cover, reading your opponent, and many other things. As a result TowerFall Ascension is accessible to casual players while also being able to keep the hardcore players interested.
Specs
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Pros
Pro 3 player local co-op
The Cave supports up to 3 player local co-op play. Sadly there is no online co-op.
Pro Cheesy jokes of the best kind
The Cave has a good sense of humor within, something expected when considering the game was created by the same people as The Secret of Monkey Island.
Pro Characters based on 7 deadly sins
Each character represents one of the seven deadly sins making the game a bit of a moral tale.
Pro Easy to learn but hard to master
You run, jump, and shoot arrows, which anyone can learn in a matter of minutes. To become a great player, however, there is a lot of technique and strategy to learn. This includes aiming, using cover, reading your opponent, and many other things. As a result TowerFall Ascension is accessible to casual players while also being able to keep the hardcore players interested.
Pro Feels fair at any skill level
Each player only has three arrows at the beginning of a match. Once they are fired, the arrows can be picked up by anyone. This way no player can build momentum that feels oppressive, allowing even new players to control the pace of a match since they can just hog all the arrows.
Pro Single-screen levels add depth to strategy
In the style of old school games like Asteroids, everything that moves outside the edge of the screen appears on the opposite side of it. Because of this you always need to remain aware of your surroundings and other player locations, so you don't get hit by an arrow coming from an unexpected direction. This adds a level complexity not found in many modern games, which is quite refreshing.
Pro Co-op mode that improves communication
TowerFall Ascension has a 2-player co-op mode where you and your friend fight against hordes of bad guys. It has friendly fire, so you need to communicate to avoid hurting each other. This creates a mode that motivates you to communicate with your friend more, leading to a lot of back and forth banter.
Cons
Con Tedious level design
There is a lot of backtracking and lever pulling that gives a feeling of lazy level design to elongate the game.
Con Co-op may leave one or two players out on certain stages
Some stages do not offer gameplay for all co-op players. Although the co-op is drop in drop out, certain points of the game do not offer anything for the other players to do.
Con Really short co-op campaign
The co-op quest mode takes around seven hours to complete. So if you're not interested in the competitive multiplayer aspect of TowerFall Ascension, you'll run out of things to do really fast.
Con Limited to just local multiplayer
As it is now, you're limited to just playing with or against your friends or not playing at all. If you could play matches against other players online, the game would've been a lot more accessible.