Pizza Tower

Pizza Tower is a fast-paced platformer made by a small team led by a creator going by the name Tour De Pizza, inspired above all by the classic Wario Land games on Nintendo's handheld consoles. The player controls the chef Peppino Spaghetti, who is trying to save his pizzeria from demolition, and races through wildly animated levels full of jumps, drifts, secret shortcuts, and absurd character transformations. The key element is getting through each level as fast and smoothly as possible without a single stop, which the game rewards with a score rating, an escape sequence at the end of each level, and unlockable bonus sections for a perfect run. Collected points also let the player unlock new characters with their own movement abilities, giving them motivation to return to previously completed levels again and again.

On Xbox Series X|S, the game runs with stable performance, which is absolutely essential for this type of frantic, millisecond-precise platformer, and it excels with hand-drawn animation in an extremely exaggerated, comic-book style with near-constant motion on almost every pixel of the screen. The soundtrack combines energetic electronic and rock tracks that dynamically change depending on how fast and aggressively the player progresses through a level, underscoring the sense of frenzied pace and the game's humorous tone throughout.

The game was released on PC in 2023 and arrived on Xbox consoles later via Game Pass, quickly earning a reputation as one of the most original indie efforts of its time thanks to its combination of old-school platformer design, technical precision, and thoroughly distinctive humor and visuals. Pizza Tower is now valued as a modern tribute to a genre that had long waited for a worthy successor, and among fans of fast platformers it's one of the most frequently mentioned and warmly recommended additions to the catalog.

Why play it: For its combination of old-school platformer design, technical precision, and distinctive humor, it's a modern tribute to the genre that fans of fast platformers have long been waiting for.