When comparing Tiny Brains 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 Tiny Brains is ranked 47th. 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.
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Pros
Pro Local play makes for good back and forth between friends
Cooperating with players/friends in the same room can be quite fun bringing back memories of console games of the past where friends are yelling at each other in order to solve the levels of the game. When finally completing a level the sense of exhilaration is something that can't be matched over the internet.
Pro Great for couch play
Tiny Brains offers full controller support on PC, which makes it easy to control on a Steambox in the living-room.
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 Very short campaign
The campaign itself can be played through within roughly 4 hours.
Con Single player is taxing
Due to the mechanics of the game needing all 4 characters in the level to solve a puzzle the single player mode sees the player hot-swapping between characters quite often in order to advance. This gets old pretty quick.
Con Looks to be abandoned
There are bugs in the game that inhibit connecting online with other players. This has been reported multiple times on the games forums with no response and the last update for the game was in 2014.
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.