A Day in GMod Tower

What can I say about GMod Tower? Well, it has a really good effect for being drunk, that’s one thing. Not that I would know anything about being drunk, anyway. But I did spend a sizable amount of time stumbling around aimlessly vomiting on things. Which, for some odd reason, was way more entertaining than it had any right to be.

The screen takes a green tint, your character stumbles around aimlessly and occasionally there’ll be an impressive sound effect that can only be summed up as HWORK that plays as your stomach rejects the half-barrel of alcohol in a last-ditch effort to save your liver. Now, as a last ditch effort to save my fragile integrity, let me talk about something that doesn’t relate to bodily fluids.

GMod Tower, as it can currently be described succinctly is a lobby system. You’ve got a large, interesting lobby, or the Tower, that has the ability to branch off into several gamemodes. I’ll go more in depth into the game modes later on. What makes GMod Tower interesting is that it actually makes the down time between waiting for games to open up (or fill up in my case) something you’d want to do. Besides puking all over the lobby, if I wasn’t playing a game mode, I was in the Arcade playing Tetris.

But the Suites are the standout feature in GMod Tower. They give you a space of your own, a place to decorate. I mean, the half dozen stores in the Plaza have to have some use. They’re use is for sprucing up your suite with various items and decorations. If you’re anywhere near clever enough you can dramatically change the layout of your rather cramped space. Or, if you’re like me and possess no imagination, you can simply use it as a space to store your trophies, hats, beer kegs and whatever miscellaneous knick-knacks you have floating around.

Now that I’ve talked a bit about the actual lobby, here’s a bit about the gamemodes. The two original ones are PVP and Ball Race, with Virus being added in much later. PVP is pretty much self-explanatory. The entire premise of the game, as the title suggests, is that you have guns and there are people who needs shooting. It’s not really your classic Half-Life 2 Deathmatch experience, though. I mean, there’s a lot of leaning side-to-side as you strafe, and it’s harder to kill people.

The mode’s main draw is the fact that you can get buyable weapons for it. Depending on how high you place, you get a cash bonus which can be transformed into PVP weapons, Ball Race cosmetic items, stuff for the Suites or miscellaneous items. This is true for all game modes. However, PVP seems to be the least played gamemode out of all three because it doesn’t add anything really interesting to the table. It’s simply the same deathmatch game we’ve seen for a while with some shiny bangles taped onto it.

The standout game mode in GMod Tower is Ball Race, hands down. It’s a rather shameless Super Monkey Ball clone with less manipulation of the gameboard itself. In fact, it’s so shameless, that the bonus level music is the same from SMB. I’m not complaining though. There’s been a couple Super Monkey Ball clones on the PC in years past, like Switchball and the Dreamball Source mod. This one happens to be the first that does Super Monkey Ball as a competitive multiplayer game. Surprisingly, it manages to do it well. The three worlds, two of which I tested, are quite inventive. This caused Ball Race to quickly become my favorite bit of GMod Tower, simply because it seems like the most “finished” game mode. The fact that it’s actually good was a nice bonus.

Ball Race has a similar draw as PVP, where money is given to those who collect the most bananas during the match. I thought this was kind of odd at first, since it’s Ball “Race” and you don’t actually get anything for placing first.

The third and final game mode is called Virus. This seems to be slightly more original than PVP, but more flawed as well. It’s basically a fancy version of Tag, where one person is predetermined to be the “Infected”. The Infected’s jobe is to run around and touch the gun-toting survivors, turning them infected. The game ends when all survivors are infected or when time runs out. I had some issues with Virus, and most of it is situational. It doesn’t work very well on maps with large sight-lines. While the Facility map from Goldeneye and that one from Unreal Tournament work very well, the Aztec map doesn’t because the infected player is gunned down fairly quickly before he’s even within range. Also, you can’t jump. I’m sure there’s a reason for this, but it seems a little odd.

It also doesn’t work well if you have less than four players. Games with four or more were plenty of fun, but once you only get three or less it’s a little tedious. Because the game starts with a minimum of four people, this normally isn’t much of an issue. It was for me because our fourth disconnected/crashed, leaving three of us wallowing in unhappiness.

I’m very impressed with GMod Tower. The GMT development team has managed to do things with Garry’s Mod that I haven’t ever seen pulled off with near enough polish. But after playing for a while I came to the conclusion that the best part of GMod Tower isn’t what is actually included in the game. It has this massive amount of potential for greatness, and it’s shown by the gamemodes that are currently in production–a half dozen of them. The only thing that could ever hold GMod Tower back is the lack of players that plagues so many other mods. It’s not really a problem now, since the main server hovers around 20 players and the game modes only need four. Once the mode that require 10 to 20 players on at a time start coming out, this might be an issue. But for now, GMod Tower is some of the best that Garry’s Mod has.

You can find the main site here . Because of the overlap in content, you need Garry’s Mod (to connect and load the content), Counter-Strike Source and Half-Life 2 Episode 2 installed before you load the game. If you don’t have one of these two, you’ll have missing textures and models all over the place and that’s no good. To connect to GMod Tower, filter the maps in Garry’s Mod by gmt_build, then join the Tower server. Alternatively, click here when you have all the content installed.