The year is some where in the near future. Humans created A.D.A.M. (Autonomous Dueling Armed Machines) to fight their battles, however after the A.D.A.M.s won the battles, the humans did not know what to do with them so they throw them in a tower and force them to fight. You take control of one the A.D.A.M.s and fight your way up to the top of the tower.

If there is one thing to be said about Rengoku is that it has some interesting ideas, but the interesting ideas suffer from poor execution thanks to poorchoices made by the developers.

The controls are plain akward and very frustrating. The D-Pad moves the character around, while you use the Analog stick to move the camera. This is not bad when you are not in combat, but this game is based upon nothing but fighting enemies so it is frustratingly bad because the Analog stick is right below the D-Pad so hiting both at once is not bad when you don't have to hit the Triangle, Circle, or Square to fire. This is one of the biggest areas where this game falls flat on its face. The controls are extremely bad and they make playing this game painful.

When the game starts, you get this video with credits. The problem is that the video is terrible and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But it is ironic, the video is like a warning that is telling you not to play this game. The story also is completely boring and uninteresting. Another problem is that there is only story development before a boss fight, but there is no voice acting so you have to read and read and read. In fact, I just found my self skipping the boring and uninteresting dialogue.

The first level is a basic tutorial level and is extremely short. The goal of each level is to beat every enemy in each room on the floor. This opens up a teleporter that will take you to the boss for the floor. Now the great thing about this game is that it has randomised levels, and the sad thing is that this is one of the good things about this game. Now when you first fight a boss, chances are you are going to get slaughtered unless you either leveled up your stats or you used the infinite elixir trick. So guess what this means, replaying the entire first floor over and over and over again until your stats are high enough so losing to a boss is very common.

When you kill enemies, they some time drop weapons, and this is where the game also shines. The customization is not that bad, but enemies only drop weapons the higher you fill up the bar after you beating them. Filling this bar up is a real headache. So getting a weapon every time usually does not work. But talking about weapons this game has some weird ones like a double hammer and head pistol. Yes, you can equip cross bows and guns to your head, while equiping either guns and melee weapons to your arms. The control layout is not that bad. The triangle is used for head weapon, while the square and circle are for your left and right arms.

Now while Rengoku has some interesting concepts the game suffers from poor execution. The story is uninteresting, the controls are terrible, the game play is extremely repetitive, and replaying the same levels over and over again because the boss destroys you is not fun. Rengoku: The Tower of Purgatory gets a 1 out of 5.

And on a side note, Rengoku actually had a sequel. But not only a sequel, but a third one is being made for the PS3.