Towerborne early access preview — Loot grabbing fun

David:
Towerborne is one of those games that seems to intend for players to just hang out with their friends, with the focus more on the conversation rather than the gameplay. It’s a perfect fit for a beat-em-up and, though it still has a ways to go, this early access version still holds a ton of promise.

In the world of Towerborne, humanity’s last bastion is the Belfry. As an Ace, your job is to protect the tower from monsters, but there’s a catch. While Aces can’t die, the first time they do they lose all of their memories. As a newly revived Ace, you have to get acquainted with the tower and various fighting styles.

There are four classes to play as: Sentinel, Rockbreaker, Pyroclast, and Shadowstriker. Each has their own abilities, combos, and weapons. While the Rockbreaker is slower and hits harder, the Shadowstriker can hit enemies with a flurry of attacks and move quickly around the battlefield. Thanks to some incredibly satisfying animations, all the classes are fun to play, so find what works for you and stick with it or swap around at your leisure.

As you play, you’ll gather tons and tons of loot to equip. These include new weapons and armor, though there are probably more types later on in the game like cosmetics or currencies. It can be a bit overwhelming sorting through all the stats and effects on every piece of equipment, so I hope they add an optimize button in the future just to quickly get in and play.

Joining up with your friends is thankfully pretty simple. I just clicked on one of my Steam friends and hit Join Game. This automatically put us in a party, and once we were both on the world map we could jump into a stage. The stages we were able to play were all pretty much the same, however. A grasslands area with enemies called Gobbos and a treasure chest waiting at the end. The combat is still very enjoyable, so hopefully they can add more enemy types to this starting area.

If I do have one big complaint about the combat though, it’s the lack of dodge/block canceling. While you’re in the middle of a combo, you have to wait for the animation to finish before you can take a defensive action, leading to a lot of times where I got hit while mashing the dodge button after seeing an attack coming from a mile away. This leads to missions being tougher than they should be in single player, but incredibly easy in co-op because the other player can take some aggro off of you. There’s certainly a balance still to be found here, and I look forward to the final version.

Finally, let’s touch on the story and visuals. The story here really isn’t a focus of the game as far as I can tell, though the store page says one of the rewards for questing will be lore. I don’t find that an interesting prospect myself, but to each their own. Likewise, I’m not a fan of the visuals. It just looks very “licensed game based on a cartoon” and overall very generic. I don’t think it needs to be more realistic or even flashy, but something that makes the game stand out feels needed. Keeping things lower fidelity so more people can play it should be a priority though, especially if the game ever becomes playable on Steam Deck.

Mark:
Towerborne is a beat-em-up style game reminiscent of classic arcade games but with some light character customization RPG elements added in. The four classes to choose from all feel unique and equipping different weapons and gear will give you access to various special abilities and stats. The world map exploration is a fun lure that keeps you engaged and wanting to see what’s over the horizon. Towerborne can be played solo or cooperatively, however, the latter is where it shines and the only way I see myself playing it.

Towerborne is currently in Early Access on Steam, but will come to Xbox at a later date. There are Gold and Silver Founder’s Packs available to purchase containing various cosmetics, which were provided to GamingTrend. The game will be free to play when it launches in 2025.

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