Towerborne Preview – Stoic Studio’s Live-Service Beat-Em-Up Journey
When it leaked way back in 2021 that Stoic Studio, developer of the critically beloved The Banner Saga titles, was crafting a side-scrolling action game, I think many of us imagined something that looked a little different from the title that was officially revealed by an Xbox presentation last year. Now, Towerborne is preparing to launch into paid Early Access ahead of a free-to-play full release next year, and pretty much everything about this idea is leaving me with questions.
Gameplay Overview: Classes, Combat, and Customization
Towerborne is an action beat-em-up game with RPG elements. The player controls an “Ace” with no memory, essentially a reincarnated human in a form designed to protect The Belfry, the tower the game is named for. This is most of the plot the player gets for the first several hours of play, the first of several issues contributing to an odd first impression.
Switching between the four distinct classes reveals depth in combat mechanics, especially the rogue’s agility and powerful brawler moves.
The game puts you through the tutorial as a Sentinel, a very basic sword-and-shield fighter, which will likely set a precedent in the player’s mind that this is the “default” experience. However, after a few levels as the Sentinel thoroughly bored me, I tried the other three classes – a dual-wield, dodge-heavy rogue, a Hulk-fisted brawler that can shove enemies across the screen into hazards, and a glance-esque club wielder that can ignite their weapon – and found all of them significantly more compelling than said “default,” to the point where I don’t understand the decision to start the player as the Sentinel.
Randomly Generated Levels – A Strength or Weakness?
The game levels take place on tiles of a world map that unlock as you complete the adjacent tiles, and an overall “danger level” determines which levels can be accessed. Each level is randomly generated, which is what I would consider another significant issue with the introduction, as it ensures that players will spend at least an hour repeating what feels like the same short stage over and over again. I started to have a lot more fun when I switched classes, eventually defaulting to the rogue, but it still felt like a grindy experience compared to what I’m used to in beat-em-ups.
The game features a pretty basic light/heavy attack combo system, with skills on cooldowns and class abilities. The terrain is littered with hazards that can affect you or your enemies, with a solid emphasis on making sure your foes set them off, and they can even hit each other if you strategize right. You’ll quickly encounter bomb-tossing foes that can be interrupted pre-throw, causing them to drop the bomb right at their feet, though funnily enough, they usually seem to remain still afterward and ensure that they get caught in the explosion.
Towerborne’s randomly generated levels offer variety but can feel repetitive over time, especially during early stages.
If you can get into the flow of things, combat feels satisfying enough. However, I found that the Sentinel’s block feature was almost useless, as the delay between the start of its activation and the shield actually being in place felt too long. I never quite got a handle on how the club worked, but that made it no less fun to swing around and explode in my enemy’s face, and the other two classes were easy to grasp.
The game is mostly functional and fun, but I’m concerned with how the plan for the title will ultimately impact its quality. Towerborne is and was always planned to be, a live-service game that gets content updates and is designed primarily for online play. It’s supposed to be a lengthy experience. Hence, the multitude of randomly generated levels is supposed to keep players invested in keeping going and spending on either the founder’s packs during Early Access or the microtransactions during the full release.
Towerborne’s Live-Service Model and Future Concerns
Having microtransactions isn’t automatically a condemnable offense in my book, but the way Towerborne is designed contrasts sharply with the best examples of its genre. The most high-profile beat-em-ups of the last few years – TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge, Streets of Rage 4, Scott Pilgrim vs the World – all have two notable things in common. The first is their distinctive art style, but the second and most relevant is that they’re all short and highly structured. The longest, Scott Pilgrim, still only clocks in at under five hours for a normal playthrough, though all of them will be much longer if you’re chasing 100%. You get a well-paced experience that doesn’t last long enough to get stale.
Final Thoughts on Towerborne – Potential for Growth or Repetition?
Towerborne, by contrast, is a live-service game designed to be as long as possible and be able to take a theoretically infinite amount of time. The fact that much of your time with the game is going to be spent playing randomly-generated levels that all feel the same doesn’t inspire a ton of hope that it’s going to be fulfilling enough to its audience to hold their attention when there are plenty of other free-to-play titles out there with a lot more going on.
Maybe there’s still time to make some adjustments during Early Access and potentially reduce the amount of sameness that players will be trudging through. Still, it would be at the cost of the necessary longevity of any live-service title. I’ll be waiting and seeing in the meantime.
Towerborne releases in Early Access today, September 10, 2024, and in full access for free sometime in 2025 for PC via Steam and Xbox Series consoles.
