Very few crowdfunding campaigns gain my attention and even fewer see me reach into my pocket. Stoic, as it happens, is one of the few developers I’ve been happy to dig deep for. It’s a team I truly admire, they’re artists and I revere The Banner Saga in such a way, I was always going to be eager to see what came next for them. Their partnership with Xbox, a match made in heaven for me, has yielded Towerborne, a project about as far removed from what I’d expect from Stoic as it gets.
It’s as if after The Walking Dead Telltale went on to make a third-person shooter, it’s surprising. Though it’s absolutely playable solo, the game is designed as a four-player beat ‘em up not unlike Castle Crashers. And although I cherish the impenetrable long-game of The Banner Saga’s Chess-like combat, the offering in Towerborne is so easy to pick up and mindlessly slog through that it means anybody can play it.
With that said, there’s also a surprising depth to its combat classes and systems that grew on me the more I dove in. I neared a point of writing it off as mundane and one-note before something clicked and I began to unravel combos, positioning and strategy through its gear and Umbra mechanics, opening up doors once closed to me. There’s a lot that Towerborne does to keep its combat from growing stale, and much of that comes down to each of the four classes feeling rather distinct—I ultimately fell in love with Pyroclast, however it’s rewarding and recommended that you chop and change considering certain class-specific weapons boast special attacks that are super fun to toy around with and can change the flow of battle.
There’s one tiny thing that Towerborne does that’s such a small quality of life thing, it almost feels silly to note it—but I can’t help it, I love it. If an enemy slips past and threatens to flank your unprotected rear but they get clipped by your attack on their way through, they’ll rubber band back in front of you, open to receive the barrage that’s coming. Being an online game, one that could, theoretically, be scuppered by latency issues, I see this as a micro effort to remove the potential for lag-related deaths.
I must emphasise that this game is designed with co-op in mind and my experience has, so far, been entirely solo. I’m happy to report that one-out is a completely viable way to storm the grasslands at the foot of The Belfry, as the game scales based on a number of other factors like player count and level. The combat itself quickly falls into a rhythm of bearing left or right, delivering punishing combos, and carefully dodging the precise attacks of the Gobo legion. Much like there are multiple classes of Ace, the Gobo army runs deep and there’s a lot of variety that can, at times, force some consideration just as the game’s rather standard hack and slash fare is starting to wane.
It was at a certain point that I realised that I did find Towerborne repetitive, however the brawling itself wasn’t the offender at all. I’d grown bored of the core loop and of its mission structure. The game’s map, which is set up kind of like Catan’s honeycomb grid, has so many stages to trudge through, it’s disappointing a vast majority of the missions are what Stoic call “discovery” tiles, which are simple end-to-end brawls with a loot chest at the end.
The other main events they have are ventures, which are treated more like mini-raids and include matchmaking where the others do not. They’re often capped by boss fights which do look cool without prompting much of a change in approach. As your legend grows around the Belfry, you can qualify for higher ratings of Danger Level, which both broadens your literal horizons and unlocks more of the map, while letting you replay prior “ventures” at a higher difficulty, leading to a different pre-mix of settings, events, and enemies. It sounds great in theory, but it doesn’t quite achieve the replayability I’d hoped for.
All of the player “progression” occurs loot-side, there’s no role-playing elements to speak of, which keeps it clean and simple. The chase of grinding levels and having bigger and bigger numbers against your equipped items is about as exciting as things within Towerborne’s menus get—which is unfortunate, as you spend plenty of time in them. Although any agency over back story or name is snuffed out right away, there’s enough depth in character creation to inject a shred of identity into your avatar.
The Belfry itself functions as any other service game hub world. It’s the point of retreat in between missions and is a key scene in much of the game’s onboarding, of which there is plenty. It’s an enormous space, and while there are many world maps installed about the place, you’ll still do plenty of trotting back and forth to talk to everyone. Though I couldn’t see anywhere to buy weapons, you’re certainly able to upgrade them at the Belfry’s blacksmith, and there’s a personified mirror who can grant you the gift of transmogrification in the event you grow bored of your Ace’s look. Bounties give you something to work towards in combat, although they’re a rather average assortment of tasks thus far, however the coin you receive in exchange can be used in Towerborne’s item shop which teeters at the cliff face of egregious microtransaction nonsense, but we’ll likely have to wait until the game is properly live to see how bad it is in practice.
Towerborne feels like such an enormous departure from The Banner Saga both in style and tone, it’s hard to reconcile they’re from the same studio. They’re both gorgeously hand-drawn, though Towerborne feels more vibrant and family-appropriate, which feels like a cool breeze on the face after the depressing caravan-led death march the team cut their teeth on. It’s more stoic, hopeful, and triumphant and this bleeds through in both the game’s bold, colourful biomes and its original score, from frequent collaborator Austin Wintory.
Though it might lack the polish of something like Hades II, whose only similarity here is that they’re early access contemporaries, Towerborne shows just enough promise and holds just enough aces that I feel it could make something of this rather shaky, inconsistent start.
After crafting one of the most arresting tactics trilogies of all-time in The Banner Saga, which had a recognisable identity in its own right, I do applaud Stoic for venturing beyond the relative safety of their pedigree in trying something new. It doesn’t offer the same emotional resonance, however Towerborne’s seeming goal of “Castle Crashers except pretty” delivers on what is a mindless, yet moreish, brawler.
Towerborne releases on Steam in early access September 10, 2024. Find more information here.
