Last year, my personal GOTY was tied between Void Stranger and Pizza Tower. I eventually decided to get behind Void Stranger because it was more important to me to tell people to play it and how fuckin impossible great it is. Pure mechanics though? Pizza Tower in a walk. This year, Pizza Tower is threatening to do it a-fucking-gain with a free update that adds a new playable character that plays so differently that all these stages look and act differently now. They also added a secret third mode that I think could possibly get someone killed! What a great game!

The Noise was tricky to adjust to. Everything worked slightly differently than how it used to, and I couldn't help but feel as if The Noise was just inferior to Peppino.

That was my initial impression, because a few levels and P Ranks in, The Noise became my preferred way to play Pizza Tower. Instead of taking 30+ hours to trudge through all of the game's content in order to reach 100% completion, I did it here in a third of that time.

Part of this is certainly due to the lack of changes each level has undergone. While powerups go from being completely different to only having minor changes, the layouts themselves are entirely unchanged (I think, there might be some very small adjustments I'm forgetting). This was disappointing to learn, as there really isn't any new content for The Noise to forge a path through. Nothing tailor made to make the most of his skillset, and while said skillset fits like a glove into the game's stages already, I couldn't help but feel waiting longer for something more substantial would have been preferred.

All in all, this really is a New Game+ version of Pizza Tower, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game again. There are a couple of cute twists throughout, but not enough to elevate this to new heights. While The Noise may have made Peppino hard to return to, he's still acting as an invader to that man's campaign.

Pizza Tower was my favorite game of 2023. An extremely fun platformer that brilliantly combined the speed of Sonic the Hedgehog with transformations that constantly turned the gameplay on its head. I saw so little room for improvement that I assumed the developers would immediately move on to a new project.

Enter the Noise Update. The premise is identical to the Plague of Shadows expansion in Shovel Knight. You play as one of the game’s villains going through the same levels, but with a completely different moveset to provide a fresh experience. I did like this a lot more than Plague of Shadows, however, and that’s because the levels feel like they actually accomodate the moveset despite minimal changes from the base game, if at all. Rather than trying to completely change the controls, Tour de Pizza made subtle changes that often made these levels MORE fun.

The first of these changes is the wall bounce. When you grabbed a wall as Peppino, he would stick to it and start running upwards. He could jump off the wall, but his speed was reduced while in the air. With The Noise, it’s the opposite. He will bounce upwards when hitting a wall and can keep grabbing it to get some extra height, but doing so gradually slows him down. Therefore, it’s good to use his powerful slam and uppercut abilities just before losing all of his speed to maximize height. Mostly though, the bounce will be used for a quick turnaround to grab another wall or landing on a slightly-out-of-reach platform while preserving air momentum. The new tornado spin made downward movement much more fun than the standard ground-pound since you can also move horizontally to wipe out defenseless enemies and preserve even more speed. The super jump was also tweaked so that it can be activated from a standstill. All of these changes result in a loose control scheme that allows The Noise to hold onto his speed in more situations than the already-agile Peppino ever could.

That alone deserves tremendous praise, but Tour de Pizza also found time to remix most of the transformations, adding a neat spin to their respective levels. Some of them had me in hysterics like the Noise eating a rocket to fly, rolling up steep walls without stopping while in a barrel, and devouring a pepper pizza at the start of RRF to make the level easier. He should be in prison for his animal abuse though. Poor Mort. :(

If Peppino was learning how to control a car, then the Noise is learning how to control a skateboard. I suck at skateboarding. Getting most of the P-ranks with Peppino was hard enough, but you have to be a legend to P-rank everything with the Noise! I will not be doing that in the forseeable future due to a few levels that I disliked regardless of character choice, but what I will do is retroactively raise my score of Pizza Tower. The level secrets do not bother me anymore, and I can confidently say this is a GOAT platformer for me.

I have no idea if Tour de Pizza plans to add more content, but if so, I would love them to take the Shovel Knight approach and create new levels based around a different character. Yes, I am seriously suggesting Pizza Tower could be the next Shovel Knight. That’s for the devs to decide, however. If they are content to stop here, I will respect that. They have created a platforming masterpiece.

A fun update to one of the best games from last year. The Noise is fun to play as but can be a bit too chaotic with his moveset for my liking which still makes me prefer playing as Peppino (though being more chaotic is very fitting for his character). It was fun going through the game as him and seeing what changes were in each level. I'd recommend playing through this even if you've already beaten Pizza Tower's original campaign as there's enough changes to make it still fun and unique on replay.

Some say that the best things are those that take its time in the oven before fully baking, and let me tell ya…

Tour de Pizza fucking COOKED.


It's almost heartwarming to see this realized: I still remember those first Pizza Tower demos on Twitter and Youtube and the Noise always being in the forefront, either as a boss of major part or them or an outright playable character. As we all know, in the final game he’s World 3’s final boss, not even the main antagonist of the game, tho that didn’t stop this psychotic gremlin from being charming as hell… but nah, I really wanted the fucker to be playable, and more than a year later, he’s here, to the dismay of all Italians.

I would have still felt satisfied if Noise felt less interesting or exciting to play as than Peppino, ‘cause I mean, it’s goddam Peppinno, but no, they just HAD to go all out and make a banger move set. I still don’t really know which of the two is my favorite, but that’s just a testIment of how fucking fun Noise is and how it accomplished what it’s going for: to make you feel that you aren’t playing as an overstressed cook, but as a goddam ANIMAL.

If Pepinno was the ‘’fight or flight’’ concept personified, then Noise is just the FIGHT, he cheats the game’s puzzles how many times necessary, he super jumps whenever he wants, he doesn’t need of Gustavo and Brick to save him, he’s got himself! Literally! Like there’s another one of him just becauseWHAT THE HELL IS THIS CHARACTER. And I mean, they gave him the sausage gatling, so at this point I’m pretty confident saying the game is finally whole, this is it chief, happiness has been found.

It taps once again into that sheer adrenaline burst that the first playthrough perfect, but in a completely unhinged way. Once you learn how everything about this mad lad works, everything clicks, the levels break open and the amount of tricks you’ll be performing are second nature: skate wall jumps, tornado spins into dives into jumps into more tornado spins, pizza crushers that demolish everything without much of a sweat and using it is super easy, and that’s not even mentioning how ALL extra mechanics, like the ghost transformation or the rocket, are completely changed to fit this rat brain’s way of acting, and it’s exciting to learn and glorious to master. They somehow found a way to make WAR harder yet more fun. HOW.

One would think that, since it isn’t a boss anymore, part of Noise’s completely unhinched persona would be lost in translation to playability, yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. Some levels even change lay-outs to fit him better and be more fun, but at this point I think it was the Noise himself that changed the before entering to make his life easier. His animations, how all title cards just have different drawings of his face on top of the characters, his ‘’no thoughts’’ face each time he fights a boss and how he can DEMOLISH them with the bombs (whoever thought of that should get a raise, they are so fun to use), some new songs that I'm 99% sure are just the sounds that play inside of Noise's head, it’s INSANE, as it should and then some.

It's Pizza Tower, it obviously was gonna be insane and good, but this is next level from what I was expecting, and I’m so happy it’s here. Noise Mouse is real bois, just that justifies completely another playthrough of this game, having bomb combos and level variations is the cherry on top…

Still, huge missed opportunity to not have Noisette or any other bosses playable in the Gustavo and Brick sections, like yeah, more Noise is fun, but I just think that- Oh dear, no I didn’t mean to- OH GOD THERE ARE 100 NOISES SURROUNDING MY HOME AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-