Towerborne is a hack and slash roguelike-meets-lore-driven MMO designed to feel like "playing a side-scrolling animated feature film"

Vibrant world-building and customization sits at the heart of Towerborne. In a post-apocalyptic world where humanity has taken refuge in a fortress called the Belfry, our brief Towerborne hands-on last year revealed how the game gives the arcade beat-'em-up genre a thoroughly modern facelift. According to Arnie Jorgensen, developer Stoic's co-founder and chief creative officer, Towerborne has much more to it than that.

"When we founded Stoic the goal was to play to our strengths as developers," says Jorgensen, pointing to the studio's past work in 2D viking RPG, The Banner Saga. "We’re continuing that mindset with Towerborne and, once again, we’re leaning into solid world building coupled with a unique art style. We kept the base feeling of playing a side-scrolling animated feature film and added in-depth, fast paced combat to the mix." 

The dynamic hack and slash elements, waves of foes, and their bright red health bars overhead certainly give it a certain roguelike flourish that The Banner Saga lacked, but whether or not you're familiar with the studio's past work, Towerborne is a multiplayer adventure that could become one of 2024's biggest underdogs. 

Unleash the bats 

In a world awash with baddies to slay, Towerborne is a side-scrolling action game first and foremost. Frantic button-mashing aside, the rest of your time will be spent at the Belfry. You find a lot more than a church bell and some sleepy bats hiding in this giant, winding fortress, though; it's populated by humans instead.

"[The Belfry] is home," Jorgensen says. "A colossal, tall structure complete with homes, buildings and walkways attached to the exterior. It has lifts and pulleys that move goods to and from the wilds below, and even has waterfalls fed by a massive windmill at the top that draws water from the ground beneath." As well as serving as your main headquarters, where "players will meet between missions to check on quests, upgrade weapons at the forge, and attempt danger license trials before heading back out to battle," it's essentially humanity's last stand. A monster-apocalypse seems to have caused civilization to break down, and you and your friends are the last heroes fit to find the source of this evil and defeat it.

In Towerborne, the world around the Belfry will be constantly evolving – not only through level design and enemy spawns, but in seasonal content built around an overarching story. "I think of the world map as a candy store for the players. It’s something that they can explore and be delighted with as they stumble upon its secrets," Jorgensen hints. "I’ve worked for over a decade on MMO’s and it’s always been the Holy Grail of development to be able to take the feedback from players and then nimbly react with updates that legitimately change the game. 

"From the ground up, the map is designed to be highly-modifiable by the developers so we can quickly seed it with new enemies, bosses, crafting components, gear, weapons, biomes, game play modes and more." Through season-by-season content being added, the narrative becomes episodic, with "the evolving storyline of Towerborne" being intermittently hinted upon on your map. "This whole system is new to the genre," says Jorgensen, "And I think it’ll give a fresh feeling to the game."

If Towerborne is both an action-RPG and a "playable side-scrolling animated feature film", our playable characters known as Aces are the knights in shining armor who remember their deaths run after run. How they go about their business of monster-slaying is a matter of creating your perfect build. "Players can customize their Ace with gear, weapons, Umbral spirit beings, and Aspects," says Jorgensen. The terms 'aspect' might be familiar to any fan of Supergiant's Hades, and Stoic leans into similar roguelike mechanics when it comes to the weapons arsenal in Towerborne.

Play your way

There are four weapons classes to choose from in Towerborne, "each with different combos, move sets, stats and abilities," says Jorgensen. "The giant War Clubs are slow, heavy damage weapons that blow flames at the enemy and can ‘spin to win'. The Sword and Shield weapons are good all-arounders with defensive abilities. Gauntlets, my personal favorites, have crazy good combos and charge-up attacks that can whack baddies across the screen, while Dual Daggers are all about fast movement and single target DPS." 

Each weapon can be modded with Aspects to provide stats and powerful perks, and with Towerborne's couch and online co-op capabilities, it seems each of the four weapon types will come in handy when slotting together the perfect fighting squad. If you'd rather play solo, recruitable Umbral spirits are always there to back you up with extra abilities.

The flexible nature of build-crafting in this rogue-meets-arcade adventure leaves plenty of room for experimentation. "One of my favorite things to do in games is to try and 'break the game' by coming up with builds that the developers hadn’t even thought of," says Jorgensen, "And I earnestly hope the Towerborne community takes full advantage of this chemistry set to make a loadout kit that is both unique to their individual play style and dominant as hell – the remnant of humanity on the tower is counting on heroes," after all. It's that spirit of curiosity and innovation that looks set to make Towerborne stand out from the crowd when it launches later this year, providing a rare convergence of roguelikes, MMOs, and the arcade greats.