When comparing FEZ vs TowerFall Ascension, the Slant community recommends TowerFall Ascension for most people. In the question“What are the best pixel art games?” TowerFall Ascension is ranked 1st while FEZ is ranked 8th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Clever 2D rotation game mechanic
The core mechanic of FEZ is the ability to spin the world around in 3D, and then traverse and interact with the resulting terrain in 2D. This allows you to experience navigation puzzles that are rarely found in any other game.
Pro Brilliant puzzles
Fez has some deviously hard puzzles and mysteries that will require gathering clues from around the world to solve them.
Pro Mysterious world with lots of depth
FEZ goes beyond just being a great puzzle platformer. It also has a very clever storyline and game world with a mysterious bygone civilization that fits perfectly with the mysterious puzzles of the game.
Pro Charming graphics and world
The characters are interesting and expressive and the world they inhabit varies between vibrant forests and villages, foreboding caves, rainy cityscapes, and more.
Pro Great atmospheric soundtrack
Soft synth sounds mixed with chiptunes makes for an enjoyable soundtrack that evokes a feeling of nostalgia while creating a fitting atmosphere that complements the graphics.
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 Minimal direction
The lack of clear direction + the mysteries of the foreign writing alphabet and numeric systems may overwhelm players who got in expecting a simple & cute platformer game about a white dude with a red hat (a traditional Ottoman hat, which is called a "fez").
Con Pen and paper absolutely required for full completion
There is a lot of backtracking and so, you need to keep a pen and paper near you to take notes, because you might need something very important later on. For some people this might be a fun killer.
Con Not metroidvania
Nothing in the form of powerups,. this is a puzzle game - not a metroidvania.
Con Very limited depth
The core gameplay loop of "jump until stuck, then rotate" is boring and repetitive within the first hour. Aside from this perspective-shifting mechanic, the game does not have much to offer.
Con Limited button mapping support on keyboard
FEZ has a couple of preset control schemes to choose from, but the buttons can't have functions assigned individually.
Con Phil Fish made it
Phil Fish has had a long rap sheet of being incredibly arrogant and toxic in his behavior, purchasing this game is an implicit endorsement of this kind of behavior.
Con Guess-and-check instead of intuitive puzzles
Unlike other great puzzle games like Portal or Braid, many of the levels in Fez are unpredictable. You can't just look at the map and predict exactly what to do. You have to guess and check, and not all of the results are intuitive. While guess-and-check puzzles works well for games like The Witness, it's really tedious in a game like Fez.
Con Loads of backtracking
The world is an intertwined maze that rely on specific portals to travel between. Since the entire game revolves around locating cubes -- a minimum of 32 cubes are required to reach the game's ending (64 cubes and "anti-cubes" exist in total). A considerable amount of backtracking is needed to locate the needed cubes; which are intentionally difficult to find and acquire.
Con Slow gameplay
Navigation isn't quick, and each missed jump can make ascending an area feel like a laborious chore.
Con Frequent crashes on PC
PC version of the game has stability issues. Luckily, FEZ autosaves often so no much progress is lost when the game crashes.
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.