Towerborne Preview: The best Xbox Game Studios title of 2024?

There are a lot of very ambitious games out there, titles that claim to offer unfathomable experiences and potential, but that also then fail to reach the summits they attest to. Stoic's Towerborne seems to be one game that will not fall into this category, at least that is if the hands-on demo I got to experience at Gamescom and the small Q&A session with the studio's founders were anything to go by.

Towerborne is a beautiful mashup of beat 'em up combat and board game-like tile exploration. It's a game about conquering an absolutely enormous world map tile-by-tile to reach new areas, gather loot, improve your hero, and to increase in power level to reach even further parts of the map to face even harder foes. It's a simple premise with quite straightforward mechanics, but thanks to the massive emphasis on social elements and cooperative play, Towerborne comes across as an effortlessly entertaining video game, one that will seemingly eat up hours and hours and hours of your time in a fulfilling manner.

For starters, let me focus on the combat. It's beat 'em up through and through - meaning you use one of four class types that each differ due to their weapon types and abilities - to punch, slice, and blast your way through a variety of enemies that populate the screen at one point. It's not nearly as challenging as some of the iconic beat 'em ups of yore, but it will push you to the limit if you don't work with your allies, protect and heal each other, and focus on the more deadly threats that roll on by. Sure, Towerborne can get a little too complicated at times, to the point where it can become a nuisance to pinpoint exactly what you're doing in the heat of battle, but for the most part, this game has that really entertaining and thrilling feel that all the best games in this category bring to the table too.

Adding to this is great variety in the gameplay. You'll venture to various different strikingly animated biomes and locations to fight all manner of unique enemy variants that each require you to approach the challenges they impose in an alternative way. There are even bosses to overcome that bring radically different mechanics to understand and master and even much larger health pools that mean you and your team need to be even more cohesive and dialled in to overcome the threat they impose. Matching this up with easily and widely customisable classes that allow crazy buildcrafting options far beyond the knight just being a tanky frontline presence and the dual-bladed rogue being a quick and nimble combatant, for example, and an art direction and colour palette that wows, all the core building blocks are in place for Towerborne to be something special.

Yet it's none of this that really wowed me when it comes to Towerborne, rather it was the base that Stoic has designed and that allows them to support and grow this game in ways that will blow you away. The overworld is split into aforementioned tiles, and to get around you move between tiles completing the challenge each individual one holds to access new areas of the map. Each tile will probably take a player around 10-15 minutes to beat and the taste of the game I was privy to seemed to feature hundreds of tiles. Stoic told me that what I could see was just power levels 1-3 and that 4 would extend the map by what seemed to be around 30%, and that they have plans to expand all the way up to at least level 10 (perhaps further) during the Early Access phase, before then exploring endgame options following this. Already you can gather the scale of Towerborne, but the real kicker for me was how Stoic explained that the tile system has been designed from the ground-up so that the team can easily and seamlessly add new tiles and even swap tiles around - all without having any server impact unless it's a major content drop bringing a bunch of new features and additions.

Yes, before continuing I will add that the massive social and cooperative focus may put off a few folk out there, and that is a fair criticism. While Towerborne is fundamentally playable solo, and the game absolutely supports this, it's also a cooperatively geared project, meaning you will meet bosses that are a nightmare to overcome alone, you will have your hands full working through the enormous map without allies on hand, you will have considerably less fun without a squad, and the Belfry social hub will also feel infinitely more lonely without a squad to wander around with. But games don't need to cater for every audience at once, and being upset that Towerborne doesn't necessarily excel as a solo product in the same way that it does cooperatively is like complaining that McDonald's fried chicken isn't as good as KFC's.

But anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that while Towerborne has all the right features and organs to be a solid and impressive game in the first place, it's also supported and bolstered by a scale that is frightening. The version of the title that I played at Gamescom felt complex and refined and gives me huge faith that the Early Access debut will be a big success, but it also made me ponder the question as to why the EA debut is needed in the first place, especially considering how good the game felt in practice. Stoic mentioned that this is simply so that the team can use players as guinea pigs, if you will, as ways to properly stress test and really perfect the amazing systems they already have in place so that the eventual 1.0 debut will knock us off our feet. From the short demo of the game I experienced, I have absolutely zero reason to doubt that... You're not going to want to miss Towerborne.