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After three installments of the punishing apocalyptic strategy game series The Banner Saga, Towerborne is perhaps not the game you’d expect to see out of developer Stoic. Published by Xbox, this bright, colorful co-op action RPG is a joyous side-scrolling brawler with the weightier influences of games like Dark Souls, and it’s meant to be fun for all the family. At Gamescom 2024, I sat down to play Towerborne with three other people, guided by game director Daniel McLaren alongside Stoic co-founders Arnie Jorgensen and John Watson, both formerly of BioWare.
“It was a wonderful experience,” Jorgensen says of The Banner Saga’s success. “We may get back to it one day, but we finished it and said, ‘I want to play a game I can enjoy with my kids, that I can play with my friends.’” From that drive comes Towerborne, a game that takes the team’s beautiful art into a new fantasy setting. Here, you are an Ace of the Belfry, a tower standing as a beacon of safety among the ruins of humanity. From there, you – and your friends – can head out to tackle monsters and gather loot in a delightful action RPG.
That loot is core to building your characters, but Towerborne begins by choosing one of the four classes currently available to play as. I pick up the Sentinel – a defensive expert wielding sword and shield that uses parries and spin attacks along with supportive abilities capable of protecting their allies. The other options are the Rockbreaker, with their fast sweeping gauntlet; the Shadowstriker, which deals in dual daggers, debuffs, and poison galore; and the Pyroclast, which uses a war club that can build up heat or unleash damage-over-time effects.
Your class choice defines how your build begins, but as you find additional weapons – each of which comes with one or two built-in abilities – you’ll be able to dramatically change the way you play. Of course, you’ll also have plenty of cosmetic character customization at your disposal, and the good news there is that everything works on every character and body type, allowing you to tweak and re-tweak your look to your heart’s desire.
From the Belfry, you’ll head out across the world map, which sprawls out across a wide range of hex-grid tiles. Each of these can offer missions to tackle, along with other more distinctive encounters such as dungeon-like encounters and Umbra Shrines. This last type will unlock the final component of your loadout, an Umbra – a friendly companion that brings powerful abilities into your fights on a cooldown.
As you progress, you’ll be able to ratchet up the difficulty level for better rewards. Stoic notes that this is very much under your control; the higher you go, the more exciting loot awaits, but you can always drop it down if you want to level up your alternate classes or just have a slightly more relaxed time. There’s also the ability to bring your friends along and you can even powerlevel them to an extent, although your loot drops will be influenced by your current level.
The actual combat of missions is reminiscent of side-scrolling brawlers, and there’s an emphasis on lining up your vertical position with enemies to land your hits correctly. Typically, this isn’t my go-to genre, but I found Towerborne’s action, which feels influenced by the best soulslikes, to be a little more rewarding. Along with your standard mixture of light and heavy attacks comes your two weapon skills and your class specialties. Rounding that out is a dodge and roll combination, which gives you a pleasing flash of invulnerability.
I picked up the feel fairly quickly and, after working our way through the early enemies, our skills are put to the test in one of Towerborne’s more structured boss fights against the Pangojira. This is definitely where the combat starts to shine more, with some big area-of-effect attacks to dodge through and waves of additional enemy minions to clear out before we can finally bring down our foe. These more substantial foes can also bring some unique loot to the pool, too, so you’ll definitely want to hunt them down.
While it will be rolling out as a free Steam game for the full 1.0 launch, Towerborne has just landed in early access, which requires buying one of the game’s founder packs to take part. “We want to welcome those who want to build with us – to help us get Towerborne into the best place it can be before the games are wide open,” Stoic writes. “Banner Saga was born because you believed in us, and you invested in us, and while our studio and our ambitions and our capabilities have grown, we are committed to honoring this special relationship.”
Towerborne is out now in early access, priced at $24.99 / £21.99 on Steam for the silver founder’s pack or $44.99 / £39.99 for the gold founder’s pack. The full game will be free to play when the 1.0 launch arrives. If you’re eager to jump in for this initial release, you can do so right here.
If you love loot, here are the best games like Diablo, where you’ll find lots of it to go around. Or head over to the best co-op games in 2024 for plenty of fantastic ways to team up with your pals.
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