8-minute Review: Tower Tag in Petach Tikva

A cool activity for a work Yom Kef or a small birthday party/vacation activity

A few weeks ago, my team went out for a Yom Kef (a cross between just chilling with your coworkers and a team-building exercise). The location was called “Tower Tag” and is located in the industrial area of Petach Tikva. It is a 5-minute walk from the Em Hamoshavot stop on the Tel Aviv subway.

Tower Tag is a pay-by-the-hour virtual reality playground. The main attraction is their namesake, a game called Tower Tag where each player dons a VR headset (HTC in this case) and is also given a “gun” which is used as the controller in the game (they make you check your actual gun if you have one to prevent any terrible accidents from happening).

The game itself is a riff on Capture the Flag. Each player starts off on a base, and using the controller hops from tower to tower. The other team is trying to accomplish the same thing and the goal is to capture as many towers and also get as many “kills” while capturing those towers.

It takes a minute or two to understand what is going on and how to play, but once it clicks it is a lot of fun. The graphics are decent and it is really cool how the headset incorporates the gun into the game. To me it seems like the aim was a little off, but that might just be part of the game play. I played a few rounds of this style of the game, and then two rounds that were much more focused on the “capture the flag” aspect of the game and which was much harder to play (it wasn’t easy to know who was who because we didn’t have the chance to assign our names to our players so we are all just numbers and there wasn’t time to communicate like that).

The other really cool thing they had was VR skiing. You buckled yourself into this platform and donned the headset and then you were transported into a virtual ski slope. It was a little cartoonish, but I can see it being made a lot more realistic. Even with it being cartoonish, there was still enough to it to give it a sense of depth. A coworker almost fell over (hence the buckling in) as he was caroming down the hill.

For private customers not in a group, the cost is 100 shekel for 1 hour of VR time, with a minimum of 4 people (otherwise the games would be boring). More details at https://tower-tag-pt.co.il/.