The Banner Saga franchise is what comes to mind when Stoic Studio's name pops up. The award-winning trilogy is praised for its tactical turn-based combat, 2D hand-painted art style, and storytelling elements. However, following the third game's launch in 2018, the studio had been quiet about its latest projects. It was in 2023 that Towerborne was unveiled, showcasing Stoic's brand-new direction.
Almost everyone likely has a memory of walking up to an arcade machine and trying out a side-scrolling action game or seeing a relative play one enthusiastically on a console or PC as they waited for their turn. Beat 'em ups usually come with simple controls, a joystick for moving and two buttons for attacks, easy for almost anybody to pick up and play. Button mashing and seeing enemies fly off never really gets old, no matter what generation you're from.
Towerborne is one of those side-scrolling beat ‘em ups but with a twist. The title is going for a live service route, combining action gameplay, 4-player cooperative play, and exploration elements, along with a continuously updated fantasy adventure. Growing beyond its indie beginnings, this project of Stoic is being published by Xbox Game Studios. However, in another unlikely twist, the game is releasing on Steam first as a paid title ahead of its free-to-play launch on Xbox platforms.
This is a massive departure from the studio's earlier ventures and one I was excited to try out. Here are my thoughts on Towerborne after playing a pre-release build of the newly-released Steam Early Access version.
Towerborne
Taking place in a fantasy realm following an apocalyptic event, the setting sounds pretty gloomy, but Towerborne is a wildly colorful and springy place for the most part. A massive tower named The Belfry houses most of humanity's remaining population as monsters roam the land around it. The heroes that venture out into the wilds to push back the danger, save any stragglers, and explore the ruined lands beyond are the player characters, who are known as Aces in this land.
Aces are spirits that have somehow returned to life from the beyond to protect The Belfry. After creating my own Ace, I quickly jumped into a battle against some lizard-type enemies with the rudimentary but trusted sword and shield in hand. The art style is gorgeous. Stoic has gone for a 3D approach with a charming cel-shaded graphics style this time around for the world it’s creating.
The art style has allowed the studio to go all-out on the effects it can display on screen. The grassland biome you start in shows beautiful scenery in the background as you progress through the level. Everything from the enemies on screen to the countryside you pass through looks crisp. The animations, as those same enemies attack me with wide windup frames and my sword swishes down on them with cartoon-like hit effects, are a joy to watch.
Once the fighting is done and I finally move to the much-awaited Belfry, the tower is revealed to be the social hub of Towerborne. This wide level is filled to the brim with neatly animated cute NPCs going about their day. Everything from soldiers training for their missions and children playing on the streets to store owners displaying their goods can be seen here, making for an environment that looks busy and lived in.
However, outside of the quest givers and specific areas built to offer new options to the player character, nothing can be interacted with. Of course, being the hub area, this space is teaming with other players as they go about customizing their Ace, upgrading their equipment, accepting new missions, and training their skills to go beyond tough foes. The UI's sound effects remind me quite a lot of Breath of the Wild, which may also have influenced the graphics style and animations of Towerborne.
Going outside of The Belfry puts Aces straight into the world map. This hex-based map needs to be unlocked block by block to expand outward and explore what's out there. Each hex can be played solo, with friends, or with random players using matchmaking. It's a simple but effective system to let players quickly team up and go on adventures. Unless you’re playing with a friend, the random hexes between bosses can be a little repetitive. They last less than 10 minutes each, but without more interesting missions or mechanics outside of time challenges and mini-bosses, playing these solo is not what I would recommend doing.
All this effort to make a beat ‘em up would be for naught if the main draw of this action game doesn't deliver on the combat. Thankfully, it does this quite well, and it's deeper than it initially appears.
Combat
At Early Access launch, Towerborne lands with four weapon classes, each with completely different weapons and combos to utilize in fights. These include the sword and board Sentinel I mentioned before, a giant fire-spewing club wielder named Pyroclast, the boxing-like hard puncher titled Rockbreaker, and lastly, the Shadowstriker, a dual knife-wielding specialist that uses fast attacks and quick teleports. Each comes with its own play style and level-ups. After trying out all of them, my favorite quickly became the Rockbreaker for its hard-hitting nature with medium speed, capable of taking out groups of enemies with wide attacks.
The combo system is what I love about Towerborne. While this is a beat 'em up, the combat is straight from fighting games. The light and heavy attacks can be mixed up with taps and holds for satisfying combos that can stunlock enemies, kick them into the sky, or throw them across the screen. Jumping attacks (my Rockbreaker does a hilarious elbow slam), attack after a dodge (dropkick with Rockbreaker), plus special attacks all add to the things you can do to make enemies' days worse.
The combat can seem a little unforgiving at first. Once you commit to an attack, that will play out fully before you can do any action, meaning there isn’t an attack-canceling mechanic for dodging. If you press a button, it will happen, just after whatever you did last. I liked this sort of heavier feeling combat, but it may not be for everyone.
Even after playing for hours, my friend would exclaim he found a new combo that takes out chunks of enemies' health bars if he had enough time to pull it off. The best part is that the combos can be chained together with other Aces. Let's say the sword and board character tosses a few enemies into the air. The dagger wielder can then easily juggle those characters and deal heavy damage as other players focus on the rest of the enemies on the ground.
Another interesting addition is that the equipment you loot in your journeys can also change how you play your Ace. Those special attacks I mentioned come from the weapon you use, and they can offer different variations, usually targeting a small area for massive damage or a large area for clearing purposes. These can also be further customized using Aspect slots. They give additional bonuses like extra armor if you dodge an attack at the right moment or do bonus damage to enemies who are airborne or on fire.
Those latter status effects are especially useful when playing with friends. Much like sharing combos, having a teammate do extra damage to enemies on fire while you go about setting fire to everything on the screen, as the Pyroclast class is a legitimate strategy for breaking through tough fights. Promoting strategic planning even before the fighting starts is always a good decision, in my book.
More and more enemy variety is introduced as you go for higher level areas. What starts with small lizards with spears, shields, and bombs become bipedal foxes and wolves wielding massive daggers and bows. Then arrives the weird mushroom enemies that spew poison, hedgehogs that roll around everywhere, and, of course, bosses. Each enemy has its own attacks, and with large tells, so I would have ample time to figure out when to dodge and when to attempt an interrupt with a heavy attack. Bosses tend to punish any repeated tactics too. Getting your teammate to distract a big guy while you damage from behind will only work for a few seconds before the fresh combo it throws, which also has a backswing.
Funnily enough, reaching higher level areas on the world map and, in turn, getting better loot literally requires passing a combat exam. Currently, it involves beating some minions and a boss character solo. While not a particularly difficult fight, checking to see if the player is comfortable with mechanics like guard break, evading, and timing attacks before throwing them against tougher enemies is a great initiative. The title can easily be played as a button masher, but the higher-level boss battles at least need some coordination and thinking.
There are a couple of negatives here too, but they are not exactly related to how the combat is handled. First off, the damage you do to enemies is all handled server-side. If you are playing with high ping, that drop kick you did will take some time to register and for enemies to fly off. During the pre-release stage, I managed to get into a 300-ping server a few times, and it felt like I was almost half a second behind all the enemies. Thankfully, no rubber banding or lag spikes occurred. Hopefully, the matchmaking servers will be widespread enough for everyone to have a good time on low ping. Next, and this is the most important issue, key bindings cannot be changed at this time.
While I was happy with the inputs assigned to the controller, the keyboard and mouse were another story. Evading is a major aspect of any fighting game, and for some bizarre reason, that’s assigned to the middle mouse button or the Shift key on the right side of the keyboard, with no option to change it. Rebinding controls is the first thing I hope the developers offer as part of its Early Access journey.
The Belfry
Most beat 'em ups out there focus singularly on the action. Get from point A to point B and beat everything up in between, then repeat. But Towerborne presents RPG elements that attach neatly to the adventures our heroes are going on, and all this happens at The Belfry’s hub area. First off, the loot you receive while battling contains armor pieces and weaponry for all the classes of Towerborne. While they can be changed through the world map, it’s The Belfry that enables upgrading and dismantling options. So, while it’s not necessary to always return to the hub after battles, the game nudges you to do so to get the best out of your equipment.
The randomness of drops can be a little frustrating if you're having a streak of bad luck. Once, I had no useful daggers drop for me for quite a few levels despite wanting to keep playing that class, forcing me to swap to a different one that was gaining all the upgraded tools from finishing missions. Some sort of crafting, gifting, or trading mechanic might work well here for stubborn players like myself.
A simple questing system pushes forward the post-apocalyptic storyline surrounding humanity’s last tower, human refugees, the attacking monsters, and the Aces. Voice acting will probably arrive later down the line, but currently, you just run up to a character with a speech bubble and accept quests to beat up bosses on the world map. Random minor missions offering upgrade materials and cosmetic unlocks for doing mini objectives, like destroying enemy tents or finishing missions in a certain biome, are available to spice up things too. Our avatar’s features can be fully customized at any point from The Belfry, with everything from body type to voice and hairstyles being up for change.
Inventory space for each type of equipment and weapon you get is limited. This will probably be tweaked further as the game goes free-to-play next year, hopefully not by restricting it further. Still, it’s easy enough currently to dismantle any low level loot to make the materials needed to upgrade my favorite class’s equipment. Thankfully, dismantling in bulk is already possible. However, that everything being done server-side issue is apparent here too. Every menu and interaction in The Belfry has a slight delay due to it being tied to your ping as it contacts the server.
While I could ignore it at first, going through dozens of pieces of equipment to mark them for dismantling while each keypress had a tiny delay annoyed me by the end of it all. I wonder how much of this lag will be perceived by Xbox Cloud Gaming players once it reaches them, as they will go through two layers of latency.
Another one of my main criticisms is not being able to interact with other players you see in the hub space, or anywhere for that matter. A simple button to invite a player you see to the party or to send out a request to join for a certain mission before jumping in together, instead of just matchmaking only, would have been simple and amazing. Right now, you can only send an invite to a player you have played a mission with or search for the player’s name on Steam and send a friend request from there. Why not skip these steps that kill immersion and simply let us interact and friend each other in-game? Hopefully, this will change as early access progresses.
At the Early Access launch, no microtransactions or battle passes were sold. Once you purchase one of the game’s Silver or Gold packages, everything is yours to experience without any gates. I expect the in-game store and other cosmetic DLC to kick in once the title goes fully free-to-play and leans into its live service elements. Being a cooperative game, though, I expect many aspects of the game to be monetized without much blowback from the community.
Outside of more content like enemies and classes, being Early Access also means some elements are not entirely finished but are soon on the way. The studio has already confirmed that language support is expected to expand outside of English within a week. At the same time, matchmaking will be turned on for all hex tiles even later, with only boss battles offering the feature for now. Being in a party to play any tile in co-op is still an option, though.
Conclusion
Instead of singularly focusing on action, this beat ‘em up presents new ways to spice up the battle sequences and the downtime between them. While I’m not sure if this formula can work out in single-player, having the cooperative element at the forefront certainly helps Towerborne. The art style is gorgeous, the environments vibrant, and the battle animations are lively, making for an impressive looking battler that is always pleasing to play and quite relaxing even during tough battles. The gameplay loop of venturing out into the overworld, beating everything up on the way alongside other players for loot, coming back to the hub to upgrade what you have, handing over any completed missions and checking for new ones, and once again going out into the wilds for more action, is much more fun than I realized at first.
Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, though. The lack of key binding editing is a weird omission even for an Early Access launch, and the social hub being not social at all is also rather annoying for a game touting cooperation. Looking towards the future, I'd love to see new classes focused on ranged fighting, like some enemies already do, perhaps by giving us a bow or a spell-casting option.
All in all, this is a solid base that Stoic Studio can build upon as it continues to grow during the Steam Early Access journey it has taken. If you’re looking for a solo beat ‘em up experience, Towerborne is probably not the way to go, at least when considering what’s available right now. But as a game, you can jump in with friends for amazing combat and a loot model to get hooked on; this is an easy recommendation.
Towerborne is taking an interesting route to launching too. The Xbox Game Studios-published game is here as a paid Early Access release via Steam first, which will be followed by an Xbox Game Preview launch sometime in 2025 across Xbox Series X|S and Game Pass. Lastly, the 1.0 launch will make the game a free-to-play experience.
Towerborne is now available on Steam for PC as an Early Access release. The Silver Founder’s Pack costs $24.99 to purchase, which provides full access to the game’s base edition plus some cosmetic unlocks.
This review of Towerborne in Steam Early Access was conducted on a pre-release copy of the game provided by Microsoft.
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