Announced around a year ago, Towerborne is the first beat ’em up from Stoic Studios, the same creators of the award-winning strategy RPG The Banner Saga. This beat ’em up promises to be a continuous and expanding experience that will take place in a vast land surrounding Belfry, the last bastion of hope for mankind. You are a Towerborne, born and raised on the Belfry, and alone or together with friends you are free to explore the surrounding world, facing the perils that await to get rewards to improve your character and progress in the game.

To put it in other words, Towerborne is a live-service beat ’em up coming to Steam and Xbox, promising long-lasting support, and improvements to the game in the coming years. The early access starts on September 10th, and it will cost you 25 US bucks for the base game, or 45 Dollars for the Gold Founders Pack which will grant you a few extra cosmetics and a a few extra items monthly. After that, the game will be free to play. Despite being published by Microsoft, the early access stage will be available only on Steam, leaving Xbox players out of the party.

While I understand supporting developers is important, especially when we are talking about live service games, I think that paying 25 bucks for an early-access game that will be free after that is a bit too much. Not to mention that “free” is just a way to say that someone will have to pay for it. We all know freemium games aren’t really free especially when talking about online games. The infrastructure to keep it all running is expensive and surely the developers are planning to sell some goodies to the players.

While we don’t know what type of monetization the game will offer, we can imagine that customization items will be among them. The game offers a huge deal of customization, from your character’s visual to emojis, and is very likely that some of those will be available in an in-game shop. As long as they don’t sell items that can really change the game, I don’t see a huge problem. Well, we will soon learn everything we need when I bring my preview sometime next week.

If you want, you can already pre-order the early access by clicking on this link

Check Out The Trailer:

Check Out Some Images: