Towerborne Review-in-Progress| Early-Access

Way back in 2023, Xbox announced a new side-scrolling action RPG being published by Xbox Game Studios called Towerborne. Created by developers Stoic, the team behind the beloved Banner Saga series, the game (now that I’ve played it for our Towerborne Review!) seems to pose a curious question:

What if Streets of Rage, Castle Crashers and…Destiny – had a baby?

Well, I think that baby would probably be a lot like Towerborne.

First up, you should be aware that Towerborne is another ‘dreaded’ free-to-play, live-service game, but please, I beg you, don’t close your browser or let that put you off!

Stick around, because from my point of view, this game is quite refreshing in many ways.

It’s a medley of side-scrolling beat’em ups, action RPGs, and traditionally live-service fare, with a dash of Catan thrown in to mix things up. I’ve spent 20+ hours with the game and have maxed out one character, and I’m here to tell you all about it.

In the world of Towerborne, you play as an ‘Ace’, tasked with protecting the last remnants of humanity following the destruction of the City of Numbers. When you die, you can return from the spirit realm, known as The Ebb, and come back to The Shore (The physical realm, where we exist)

You remember your demise, but perhaps not everything else about who you are. I sense there’s some story lore at play here to be uncovered as the game goes on, but the one thing you definitely don’t forget are those sorely needed combat skills. And as you explore, fight, loot and defend this world, you’re going to die – a lot. We’ll get into that in a bit.

Welcome to The Belfry

Following the destruction of the City of Numbers, mankind fled to The Belfry, their last refuge. The Belfry is an enormous and improbably tall tower in the heart of The Wilds, keeping the general population high up and out of reach of the many beasts that roam the land below.

The Belfry acts as your homebase or hub in Towerborne. During my time in early access, I saw many other Aces wondering around The Belfry, visiting the various vendors and quest givers, adjusting and upgrading their loadout at the local forge and generally just taking in the sights. I can only imagine how bustling the heart of The Belfry will feel come the public launch.

Much like the rest of the game, The Belfry is a gorgeous place, and also great fun to poke around in. There are hidden away shops, alleys – nooks and crannies aplenty. Entire homes for the population are built around it’s spiral, jutting out precariously in haphazard fashion.

A central water fountain stands in the square, with water being pulled up from hundreds of meters below – presumably by the giant windmill, the shadow of which passes comfortingly overhead.

With all the different shop fronts and characters roaming around, it’s an assuredly cosy vibe, with a sense of place that provides a change of pace from the frantic combat you’ll participate in when exploring the lands below. The cracking soundtrack helps too.

While there are plenty of characters, quest givers and diversions to interact with during this Early Access launch, I’m surprised at how little real estate within The Belfry is yet to have a specific function or purpose, with my only guess being that as the game grows over time, the developers at Stoic have left themselves plenty of wiggle room for expansion.

An Ace up your sleeve

Towerborne provides a wealth of customisation options for players, and it all starts with creating your own Ace. You can adjust your look at any time by visiting Mirror, a curious character that quite literally resembles a very broken standing mirror you might have in your bedroom, albeit draped in a large, heavy (and very stylish!) cloak.

You can be purple, change your voice, give yourself elf-ears, adjust your hairstyle – whatever you like. There’s a nice variety on offer here to make your Ace feel unique to you, including battle scars and warpaint. As I said, you can adjust your Ace whenever you visit The Belfry, so don’t feel like you have to have the perfect look before getting stuck in.

When you first start off, you’ve been brought back to life by the elder Umbra ‘Mirror’ and another character, Paloma, daughter of the leader of the City of Numbers, Wolfram. She has the power to bring Aces back from the dead, with a little help from Mirror.

You’ll fight with one of the eventual four character classes on offer and the game will walk you through basic combat – light and heavy attacks, special moves, launch attacks, and utilising your Umbra companion.

Umbra are a special type of sentient creature from The Ebb that float alongside you and can wield specific powers to be called upon in battle. Rain down lightning or a giant meteor, fire blasts of energy to help chain combos together, or deploy balls of pure light that cause damage to anyone that comes into contact with them. And the best thing? They’re all kind of adorable.

Related: XboxEra 1v1 | Stoic Talks Towerborne

As part of coverage for Towerborne Review, I sat down with Trisha (CEO) and Daniel (Game Director) from Stoic to chat about the game. You can read the interview here when it goes live later today!

Working Class Hero

As I mentioned, there are four classes to choose from when building out your Ace in Towerborne. While you start off as a Sentinel for the initial tutorial, once that’s all wrapped up you can also choose to be a fiery Pyroclast, a powerful Rockbreaker or a swift Shadowstriker.

I chose to play as the Shadowstriker class for the majority of my playtime (mostly because I found the way the character ran to be amusing) but also because it suited my preferred playstyle – fast and offensive-focused. I hope that as the game develops, Stoic consider a ranged class in some fashion too -I feel at present, that it’s the one class that’s truly missing.

My squad mixed things up a bit however, and the majority of our playtime was made up of myself, two Sentinels and a Pyroclast. Regardless of what you choose, each class has different moves and special abilities, and importantly, you can build up all of the classes as you please. Be aware, it being a live service game, the grind for each class is it’s own thing, and while you’ll earn loot out on missions for all your classes, they each have to be levelled up individually.

Into The Wilds…

One of the smartest things that I really appreciate about Towerborne is the way they’ve approached their world design. Instead of making a broad open-world at scale, the world outside of The Belfry is made up of individual ‘Catan-like’ hexagons, miniaturised, with the player a giant as they move around. Each hexagon has a specific biome, like grasslands or mushroom forests. In order to progress to different areas, players can choose to carve a path by clearing individual tiles of their choosing.

There are unique, larger and more challenging points of interest strewn across the map, with areas as of yet unexplored covered in cloud, or blocked off by barriers if you haven’t yet reached the required level to access said location. It’s an awesome little system, and provides the developers with a clever way to constantly expand the game efficiently – simply add more hexagons for the areas you want to create and peel back that cloud layer.

Each player has a map version of their own, but will use the squad leaders map for multiplayer – meaning you can unlock chests, find new shrines to obtain more Umbras, and decide together what challenge you want to take on next.

And oh my, there’s delightful side-scrolling challenges to be had here.

Fields of Rage

Towerborne is a side scrolling action RPG, and my goodness is it a satisfying one to play. Designed primarily to play with up to 3 friends (and in the future, supporting couch co-op on console) the on-screen carnage is eye-meltingly gorgeous.

Once you squad up with your pals, you’ll head out and tackle the map in anyway you see fit, or, if you’ve been given a specific quest or objective to target, begin working towards it by clearing the route hexagon-by-hexagon on the world map.

Difficulty scales depending on how many of you there are, and if it’s a full squad, expect to miss out on blinking for the duration of a mission – things get a bit hectic. Each character has a light attack on X and a heavy attack on Y, a dodge on B, jump on A, a special ability on RB, two focus based moves which you can use by holding in the left trigger, and of course, you can call in your Umbra to assist using the right trigger. This all can combine into an insane variety in combos – and not just when you’re alone.

Enemies can be nice and varied, from giant lizards called ‘Gobos’ in addition to poison-spewing mushrooms, rabid-looking apes, and a plethora of other beasties. It all looks and feels fantastic in motion, the only complaint being that more ‘human’ like enemies are too visually similar to some of our ‘Aces’ and you may occasionally find yourself lost in the fray during play with so many bad guys on screen.

Working with your squad is where the combat can become a delirious dance of death. I can launch numerous enemies into the air, my pyroclast comrade leaps under them and sets them on fire, continuing to juggle them as a Sentinel leaps in and smashes them to the ground. Without thinking, I then dodge back in and launch them all over again.

Variety is the spice of life

My point is, by making Towerborne a side-scrolling beat’em up, bouncing off one another for cool moves feels both easy and importantly, natural to do. As always, it comes with its downsides – despite a fairly generous hitbox in terms of where you are versus where your enemy is for attacks to actually land in this 2.5D plane, you still get the occasional moment where you’re just not where you need to be to make the attack actually land a hit.

I would also say that as a full squad early-on, the game was far too easy, and because of that, more than a little repetitive, with us sweeping through huge waves of enemies with relative ease.

Thankfully, as we progressed, we began to see more variety in mission structure, with more mini-bosses, defence missions like protecting wagons or freeing trapped refugees – and dare I say (without spoiling things) some plot exposition along the way too.

Outside of that minor quibble, there’s definitely more depth here than just mashing X and Y ad infinitum, which may be your first impression after a few hours with the game.

Having said that, the other thing I really like about Towerborne – and why I find it so refreshing – is just how accessible it is. You can absolutely enjoy this by button mashing your way to victory, but the very nature of the game means that as you level up, and start to encounter far greater challenge, you’ll need to tighten up that move-set to succeed.

Dodging, successful parrying and working with your team to maximise your efficiency are going to be a requirement, rather than a random convergence. And missions are 5-8 minute affairs – you can hop on, play for a bit, and hop off again.

Thankfully, there’s a training area back at the Belfry where you can test your gear and moves before you head out for a real fight. Bear in mind, different loot and the aspects you have equipped will mean different move-sets, so you should be familiar with what you can do before you enter the fray.

As I mentioned, this is a live-service game, and while this early access version is a charged-for release, it will be free-to-play – eventually. That means tonnes of content and of course, a near constant need to grind your way to better gear.

One of the other ways to vary your build, outside of different armour and weapons is based on Aspects – these are amethyst-looking gems that you can equip across weapons and armour that let you customise your build in different ways.

Maybe you’ll have a chance to inflict poison on successfully combo-ing an enemy, maybe you can earn some health back, or perhaps there’s a chance to set them on fire. There are all sorts of perks, boons and tweaks you can make to your gear set, and loot was fairly generously dolled out when completing a mission.

License for Danger

The other way to level up the danger is to literally play through a ‘Danger License’ mission. There’s a special section in the Belfry where you as a solo player can go in and obtain the next license up when you’re attack/defence and overall gear score are high enough.

Right now in Early Access, that goes up to Danger Level 4 – you’ll have to utilise your skills, gear and special abilities to beat a challenging enemy on your lonesome to succeed. Once complete, you can take all your buddies out with you and access higher level missions together.

Between missions, you can always head back to The Belfry to re-arm with your latest loot, as well as dismantling anything you don’t need for Spirit Dust, which can be used to upgrade the stuff you do want to a higher level. Higher level gear breaks down into Superior Spirit Dust…and, well, you see where that’s going. The system for dismantling all your unwanted weapons and gear is a little laborious right now, but at least once you’ve marked everything, you can dismantle it with one button press.

Fight As One

Fair to say, I’m genuinely surprised at how much I liked, nay – thoroughly enjoyed the twenty-plus hours I’ve put in to Towerborne Early Access so far – even with the knowledge that my progress will be wiped before it becomes publicly available.

Unlike the plethora of free-to-play live service games already available, predominantly being first or third person shooters, Towerborne is different. The unique combination of side-scrolling beat’em up, co-operative play and meaningful progression is one I find uniquely relaxing to play.

It has challenge, yes, it’s gorgeous to look at (which certainly helps!), but primarily, it’s fun to play with friends. I found that conversation and laughter win out above the more demanding levels of complexity of its shooter cousins, where the conversation during matches focuses on who died where, or where the objective is.

Towerborne is slick, chaotic, gorgeous and above all – fun. I have high hopes that with an eager community and the team at Stoic at the helm, listening and reacting, and above all working with that community, Towerborne can grow – from a unique and interesting game into something genre-defining, and proving perhaps, that new live-service games can succeed, even now.

Code for Towerborne was provided for this review by Microsoft.