Live service beat ’em up games are not new. The idea has been around for almost 20 years, but back then, games like that were called MMOs. It all started with Dungeon Fighters Online, a game that has been thriving for the last 19 years and has a very active and faithful community. It’s also pretty common to see always online beat ’em ups on mobile, especially if you browse around the Chinese side of the internet. Coming from South Korea, Astra: Knights of Veda, was the latest MMOBEU release, at least, that I am aware of.

Today, Stoic Studio released Towerborne, the newest venture in this style and, while I was hyped for the game for a while, learning that it would be a free-to-play always online game really killed a lot of my will to play it. I am a single-player/local co-op guy, and most of the games I play, if not all, are playable offline I am also more of an indie gamer than anything else, so thinking that I would have to deal with some AAA shenanigans was not something I was looking for. Despite that, and despite the 25-dollar entry fee for a game that later will be free, I went ahead and bought the Silver Founder’s Pack. There’s a Gold Founder’s Pack, which comes with a few more cosmetics than the Silver, but for 45 bucks, I don’t think so.

Now, after almost 6 hours playing the game, which is enough to beat at least 2 modern beat ’em ups, I think I have a good grasp of what the game is, and what you can do in it. Let’s start with the positive points.

Towerborne is a pretty simple game to get in. There’s no account to be made, and no third-party launchers, you just click start and after a few moments you are already creating your character. And the options here are insane! There are a ton of things to tweak here, even the shape of your pupil! I know this is probably the standard of many RPG and online games, but for me, it was pretty impressive. Actually, it was so impressive that I felt a bit overwhelmed and ended up creating a generic heroin. I will probably change her in the future. After that, you have to follow a series of tutorial missions that will teach you the basics, like how to perform some of the combos available, how to use your specials, and how to equip and upgrade your gear. These tutorial missions can last around one hour or more, but they are fun to do and you won’t feel like you’re taking part in a boring tutorial. Concluding your tutorial, you will be free to roam around, take missions on the mission board, customize your character, upgrade your gear, or just roam around to see what other people are doing. The hub world is pretty vast and very detailed, so if you want to appreciate some excellent art, you will surely lose yourself here.

Graphics are another thing that Towerborne does right. The game is gorgeous, with a cartoon-ish look that for some reason reminds me a lot of Warcraft style. The Hub World has beautiful buildings, with great materials and textures, that really sell the feeling of a vibrant and vivid world. You can see children playing around, and soldiers training, there’s plenty to check here, although the illusion can fade a bit quicker than I liked. The levels are also equally detailed, with expansive backgrounds, amazing vistas, grass and trees blowing in the wind, and even some NPCs here and there, sometimes running from monsters, sometimes peaking them from a distance. The arenas are also pretty large, showing expansive fields, where lots of enemies can fit easily, thanks to the camera zooming out when enemies arrive. These huge spaces are perfect for combat, which, in many aspects, is one of the strong pieces of this puzzling game.

In Towerborne you have four classes to play, the Sentinel, which is a basic hack ‘n slash class, sporting a short sword and a shield, the Pyroclast, which is a long-reach, area damage class, the RockBreaker, which is the most similar to classic beat ’em up character, since the giant gloves are perfect to hit people in the face, and finally the Shadowstriker, a class that is all about speed and technique, thanks to its dual daggers. While the weapons are class-specific, you can share the rest of the gear between the classes which is great. You have hats, belts, shirts, and pants to wear, but their many different stats can make some of them more useful for some classes than others. With time, you will probably have a vast collection of clothing items to fit each one of your classes, or maybe you’re just like me and stick with the RockBreaker class.

The combat in Towerborne is also very good. The classes are very distinct from each other, thanks to an assessment of different combos, and the feel of the combat is awesome, with some excellent hit stuns on your enemies, accompanied by some great feedback on your controller. Beating your enemies, throwing them up, and hitting them in the air, all of this feels great and you can see that a lot of thought was put into the combat. Enemies can be annoying as heck, especially in huge numbers, thanks to a simple but effective A.I. that allows enemies to circle you or to position themselves in a way where they can hit you before you can hit them. They are not geniuses, some environmental hazards are mostly invisible to them, but that’s also part of the fun.
I mentioned the varied combos and you can bet they are. Here you have a strong and a weak attack, and as you may imagine, you can combine both to create a lot of different attacks. Things like XXXY, XYXY, YYYX, where X is the weak attack and Y is the strong one, is possible and you will find a ton of different combinations for each one of the characters. You also have the assistance of small magical creatures called Umbras that can help you with different special moves, depending on which Umbra you’re carrying. Your weapons also can have different special moves, not only between classes but also between the different types of weapons each class can hold. This brings even more variety and more than that, it gives you reasons to try each class with different weapons because you can find something new that is exactly what you wanted.
Another good thing is that the developers are promising only cosmetics in the “real-money” store when it launches in the future.

Of course, not everything can be perfect and Towerborne has some serious problems that can harm your enjoyment. The first thing that buggers me, and that’s not a surprise since I can’t quit talking about it, is the online-only nature of the game. Yeah, I know, I know, there are reasons for that and none of them are good enough for me. Having to stay online during gameplay is not really a problem where I live, but this already tells me that this game has a limited shelf-life. In 5, or 10 years, we probably won’t be able to play this game anymore, or even if it’s got the same level of success as Dungeon Fighter Online, this is a game that we won’t ever really own. One day it will go away. And there are those days when you want to play but the server is under maintenance, both from your ISP or theirs. We can compare this to Dungeon Crown, which is a game that if you look from a certain angle you can call it a live-service game, but you own it, and you can play it inside a cave if you want to.
To wrap this part up, I was unable to play this game a couple of times in the few hours I had it installed. One was because my name on Steam had a special character, which prevented the server from understanding what was going on, and the other, heavens knows why. Or the developers.

Another thing that I find annoying is the Hub world. While I think it looks gorgeous, it gets old pretty quickly. Yeah, you have multiple places around the hub that serve the same function, but you still have to walk around up and down looking for characters, the forge, or to receive the reward from a quest. After hours of playing, you can be sure that you lost a hefty amount of minutes just walking around. Bringing Dragon’s Crown to the table again, a simple map where you can teleport by clicking on icons would go a long way.
Also, the amount of gear you will have to dismantle to get items to upgrade your current gear will drive you crazy. There are ways to speed up the process, but still, this is another task that in the long run, will consume a lot of time.

While the combat is excellent, and something that I have nothing to complain about, the same can’t be said about your enemies. Yes, they are sufficiently smart, but their variety is extremely lacking. You’ll face the same small monsters over and over again until you are strong enough to enter a new area and meet two or three new enemies. The problem here is that leveling up can take a long time, so you will be seeing the same handful of monsters over and over and over again. And the same can be said about the levels. While they are beautiful, you will soon get tired of seeing the same green valleys, with the same buildings in different positions again and again. I am sure there are other types of terrains, I mean, you can see in the overworld map, but I am 6 hours in and I am a bit tired of this place.

The last thing, and this one really makes me confused, is the complete lack of matchmaking tools, or even places to play with friends. You can play with other people, but thanks to a small number of players, good luck finding someone to play.  You can play with randoms only in certain areas of the map, but not in all of the levels. You may be able to play the regular levels with a friend, but I didn’t find anyone on my list that is playing this right now, so, I wouldn’t know. The lack of a proper chat is baffling too. It’s nice that I can use emotes and decals, but these mean nothing when you’re trying to speak to someone. Optional voice chat and a chat bar are really something we need here.

At the moment, unless you’re really curious about this title, I recommend you wait. The game has a lot of good stuff, but not enough to be worth the minimum of 25 bucks that are being asked right now. There is still plenty of time to make this game better, improve the server side, implement more interesting enemies, and give the backgrounds a little more variety, unfortunately, I don’t think this game will ever be offline or have couch coop, which really defeats the purpose of a beat ’em up, but it has the potential to be a lot of fun with friends online for a couple of hours. If they solve the lack of matchmaking, and a proper in-game chat.
I will be continuously covering this game, talking about updates, and changes, until I am comfortable enough to give a final verdict, so, keep an eye on this site to stay up to date with everything Towerborne.

Towerborne is available right now on Steam: