Towerborne

My first reaction when Towerborne's 1.0 dropped was quiet surprise. Stoic built The Banner Saga around deliberate, punishing strategy and moral weight. Here they handed that sensibility to a side-scrolling brawler, and somehow the bones of that worldbuilding instinct survived the genre transplant. The Belfry hub, its survivors clinging to a tower while the corrupted wilderness presses in on all sides, carries a melancholic undercurrent that you don't usually find in a beat-em-up. The story is text-heavy and portrait-driven, with no voice acting to speak of, and that will bother some players more than others. But if you can get past the static dialogue boxes, there are characters worth following and themes about community and stubbornness in the face of ruin that feel like vintage Stoic. The combat is where this game earns its keep. Towerborne falls somewhere between a traditional combo brawler and a loot-driven RPG, landing in a neighborhood occupied by the Tales series on one side and Castle Crashers on the other. The four classes, Sentinel (sword and shield, Valor-building parries), Rockbreaker (oversized gauntlets, Break Bar stun-locking, Powderkeg Punch finishers), Pyroclast (Warclub with the Sear mechanic, burning enemies over time in wide crowd-clearing arcs), and Shadowstriker (dual daggers, blinding speed, a poison-dealing Shadowsting projectile build for mid-range players), each play meaningfully differently. The skill trees run up to level 50, allowing you to push a Sentinel toward a bleed build or spec any class into a support role that shares healing flask benefits with nearby teammates. Better still, re-speccing costs nothing and locks you out of nothing. You can swap skills outside of combat at will, which sounds minor but is actually the difference between build experimentation feeling like play versus feeling like homework. The gear system feeds directly into your playstyle rather than just padding your numbers, and Umbra companions add another customization layer: Iska offers long-range projectile support from the start, while later Umbras like Pox open up aerial combos and Picus can ring the environment in fire. The game transitioned from a planned free-to-play live service model during early access, and that history leaves some faint scars. The mission loop can grind repetitively, the campaign runs around 15 hours before the loot chase becomes the primary driver, and the co-op infrastructure lost crossplay and matchmaking during the pivot to a premium model. On PC specifically, there is no local co-op. You also cannot name your characters, which stings in a game that encourages you to roll multiple Aces across different classes. Playing solo with Umbra companions works, but the game's real rhythm only clicks when you have three other people running alongside you. Steam reception sits at mostly positive overall, which feels accurate. The 1.0 launch is a meaningfully tighter product than early access, with smoother combat performance whether two or thirty enemies crowd the screen, and the hand-drawn painterly art style, described by more than one reviewer as carrying faint Studio Ghibli energy, is one of the best-looking things in the genre right now. The narrative and combat halves never fully merge the way Banner Saga's mechanics and story did, and that disconnect will disappoint players who come in expecting choices to matter. This is not a game about branching paths or dialogue consequences. It is a game about finding your Pyroclast Sear-and-burn rotation and then refining it until it sings. If you have a co-op group and enjoy the itch that Castle Crashers, Diablo, or the Tales brawling sections scratch, Towerborne absolutely delivers. Solo players can get through the campaign and have a decent time, but the repetition bites harder without friends to paper over the cracks. The filler-quest tax is real in the middle hours, and I have exactly zero patience for XP padding dressed up as exploration. When it moves, though, it moves well. Monika, Scout Team