Towerborne stands apart from the Banner Saga series of impressive story-driven strategy games from developer Stoic Studio. But even with just a glance, it’s easy to see some familiar Stoic DNA in “Talburn.” It has a beautiful art style that’s reminiscent of a hand-drawn aesthetic, similar to Banner Saga, which gives it a powerful energy.
I played a brief demo of Towerborne at Xbox’s recent Gamescom event in Los Angeles, getting a quick look at its real-time combat gameplay. Towerborne is a side-scrolling cooperative action RPG inspired by fighting games. It’s obvious that the game draws a lot of inspiration from old-school arcade games in the genre, but Towerborne stands out with a combat system that includes a variety of combos and special moves, offering something deeper than just mashing buttons.
First off, Towerborne lets you tailor your fighting style to the weapons your character wields, and from the sounds of it, you can swap out those weapons frequently, giving yourself new options. I worked with another reporter on the demo, starting with a character dual-wielding daggers. The character’s fighting style is very fast and frenetic, with close range slashes and a mix of kicks for heavy attacks.
Each character has access to light and heavy standard attacks, which can be chained together to create combinations that trigger different attack animations. For example, I can use a light attack to chop down an opponent with a dagger, or fire off a heavy combo with a series of kicks, but linking them together triggers a new set of combos in which I can kick some enemies into the air. .
His combo abilities are even more notable for the second character in the build, who holds a heavy club in both hands. The blunt end of the club contains something similar to a furnace, which can be used to breathe fire and set enemies on fire with certain attacks. A light attack will jab the tip of the club, while a slower, hard hit will spin the club, causing massive damage. However, the combination of light and heavy causes the character to kneel down and start using the club like a shotgun, breathing out fire and igniting enemies. In addition to the damage dealt by attacks, burning enemies will briefly burn, showing that your weapons and their abilities can be used in many different ways against enemies.
In addition to standard attacks, you can also charge special abilities specific to your weapon, all of which run on a cooldown timer. My dagger character has a special ability that allows her to easily move across the battlefield and start combat by throwing knives at enemies and then teleporting to their location to start attacking. I can also throw a series of daggers in front of me, dealing massive damage to a single target, or jump into the air and throw the daggers downward, letting the knives linger on the ground, damaging opponents who walk past them. The most powerful attack in my arsenal is the magic area attack, which causes a huge explosion for a short period of time. When small enemies rush towards us, leaving traps is a good way to catch them.
The Club character has a few similar moves, one that has him spin like a top and slam enemies with the Club for long-lasting damage, and another that has him jump in the air and spray the ground with flames for a damaging effect. His AOE attack is not a magic explosion, but causes the ground in front of him to explode in a straight line.
The demo’s levels were short and had the two of us running across the grassland, fighting enemies like moles and bandits from right to left. At times, we were fighting off multiple waves that were coming at us, which required us to destroy enemy spawn points, such as tents. It’s a pretty standard fighting game, but Towerborne offers a variety of moves in combat, plus dodge steps and rolls, giving the game a more side-scrolling ARPG feel. Like an ARPG, Towerborne’s combat loop is heavily focused on finding the right moments to maximize your abilities and manage their cooldowns.
The final moments of the demo culminated in a big boss fight against Pangojira, a giant pangolin creature flanked by a horde of smaller cave-dwelling monsters. For the two of us, we naturally tended to split our efforts – concentrating on the bosses as much as possible and splitting up to take out smaller enemies as they emerged. If we’re quick, we can hit the smaller enemies as they’re burrowing out of the ground, knocking them down in one hit and thus stopping their attacks. This became an important way to manage numbers, as the game would throw 30 pangolins at us at a time. Bosses aside, it’s also difficult to manage, especially since each pangolin undergoes a pretty severe beating before dying.
The bosses themselves feature a variety of attacks that you might see in a beat ’em up game like this. It will jump around the arena, sending shock waves to the ground that we need to jump over, or throw rocks in the air that will fall around the battlefield and force us to duck. It also attacks fairly frequently, which means we have to hit the target as quickly as possible before getting rid of its long-range attacks. Towerborne will punish you if you’re not careful – a hard hit will send you flying and leave you unconscious on the ground for a while.
Movement is also a bit clunky and slow, meaning you can’t just rely on running and dodging to dodge enemy attacks; instead, you have to watch your opponent, understand how they move, and anticipate their biggest and fastest hits so that you have Enough time to get rid of them.
However, if we hit the Pangolin boss hard enough, we can stun it for a while, allowing us to use all our abilities to deal massive damage. Pyroclastic can also use its ability to set bosses on fire, dealing a little extra debris damage. We tend to divide the labor, with me using my dagger to clean up the little guys while my partner attacks the boss with his more violent moves. There are a few points where the combat gets a little tricky – take too much damage, and like in most games, you’ll drop to your knees, needing teammates to revive you, or burn seemingly extra health to save you. . In most cases, though, clever use of our special moves will be enough to keep the arena clear of enemies while we chip away at the boss’s health to complete the mission.
Our look at Talborn is very brief, focusing only on immediate combat. We know that Towerborne has a lot of real-time play systems that are primarily focused on chasing loot, and many of them have a very Destiny-like feel—there are Bungie alumni on the development team, and some of the choices have sparked interest. A decade-old MMO.
Still, what we’re seeing is promising. The game takes some getting used to, especially its movement and dodge systems, which are slower than you might expect, thus not conducive to tense, reactive gameplay and instead requiring you to think more thoughtfully about how to engage your enemies. But it’s also in line with the ’90s arcade fighting games that Stoic is modeled after, and the ARPG gameplay, such as the many special moves, and the ability to deploy interesting combos you can use to exploit your enemies’ weaknesses, feels like a smart update to the classic gameplay. , at least in our brief observations.
Towerborne will be released on September 10th on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox Game Pass.
