Han Solo is about to return to our screens this December, so allow me to steal on of his most famous lines to describe Tower of Guns; she might not look like much kid, but she’s got it where it counts.

Tower of Guns is a rogue-like retro first-person shooter, a mash up of The Binding of Isaac with Serious Sam. You run through multiple levels of the dungeon, defeating bosses at the end of each stage before moving on to the next area. Along the way you’ll fight swarms of robots and turrets, find upgrades for your character and your gun as well as new gear to use.

Let’s deal with the elephant in the room first of all; Tower of Guns is seriously ugly. It chooses to be ugly to fit with its whole retro shooter theme and that’s fine, but choosing to be ugly is still being ugly. If you’re looking for polygons, I’m afraid Tower of Guns doesn’t have them. What it does have, is frantic and thoroughly enjoyable gameplay, built on the shoulders of giants like Quake and Unreal Tournament who came before it.

With retro styling comes a lot of retro sensibilities. There is no recharging health; you have a health bar and you get health back by murdering dudes who drop health pickups. There is no sprint button, you just move and strafe like a multidirectional Usain Bolt. You want to upgrade your character or your gun? Well go kill exploring for secret areas or kill a boss, no RPG upgrade system here.

The rogue-like nature of the game mixes well with this random and crazy upgrade system. One game might see you finding nothing but health and armour upgrades, turning you into an absolute tank whilst another game might reward you with some many jump upgrades that you need to be reclassified as a bird. You’ve heard of double jump, but have you ever had an octuple jump in a game before? Tower of Guns has you covered.

Items that drop from bosses vary greatly in utility, but plenty of them come with a humorous description, name or function. Perhaps you’d like the world’s worst missile, an enormous missile with a tiny blast radius, which sadly travels at about the same speed as an asthmatic tortoise. Or maybe you’ll find the goggles. The goggles do nothing.

Speaking of bosses, they come in many varieties but all share one thing in common; they are massive. From Doctor Turret to the Big Ol’ Spikewall, each has a different method murdering you, but pretty much all of them share the same weakness. Strafe and shoot, you’ll be fine. It’s kind of this game’s thing and there is certainly more nuance to it than my description would have you believe, but you’re never going to have to think your way out of a fight in this game.

There is a vague attempt at delivering a story as you blast your way through the procedurally generated dungeons, but only through text boxes in the top corner of the screen. This means that you’ll never see any of it because you’ll be too busy dodging cannon balls and missiles. But really, it doesn’t matter. If you’re playing Tower of Guns for the story, you’re doing it very, very wrong.

Other niggles includes a repetitive looping soundtrack that can start to wear thin when you hear the same track over and over, especially given the rogue-like nature which requires a ton of playthroughs to really explore the game.

A good run from start to end won’t take you very long, but that isn’t what rogue-likes are about. Start to end might not take very long, but you’ll never take the same journey twice and the drive to unlock new gear, find new secrets and smash your previous best effort is what will keep you coming back for more. I find myself only playing in bursts as the brutal nature of failure, setting you back to square one with all your progress lost can take the wind out of your sails, but the important thing is that Tower of Guns keeps me coming back for more.