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BABEL RISING
Platform: Xbox 360
52

Babel Rising Review

A unique concept pans out to be a very boring and extremely slow game

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Babel Rising is an Xbox Live Arcade (tested) and Playstation Network downloadable title with an interesting concept. The game puts you in the role of a vengeful god with a slew of elemental powers looking down on his creations as they rebel and attempt to construct the legendary Tower of Babel. God games have always interested me and the powers available here seemed to have a tinge of Populous to them. Unfortunately after digging into Babel Rising, I found there was very little to this game and what little there is failed to keep my interest.

Babel Rising game

The core gameplay revolves around utilizing two elemental power sets to keep tiny, ancient workers from reaching the tower and building it up. Victory is achieved depending on the specific mission’s guidelines (defeat 450 workers, spare 25 cursed jars, hold out for 10 minutes, etc.). Defeat always comes when the workers are allowed to fully construct the tower.

At the beginning of each mission, you choose two of four power sets including earth, fire, water and wind. Each set contains two powers: a single point power and a draggable area-of-effect power. For example, the Earth powers include dropping a rock from the heavens onto a single worker’s head and a draggable power creating a rupture in the earth wherever you drag your cursor, launching the workers high into the air. The workers make their way up and towards the tower along one or more predetermined pathways depending on the level (a la tower defense games). It’s that simple really.

Graphically, Babel Rising is not much to talk about one way or the other. Its overall cartoony style reminded me of a less-stylized Age of Empires Online. The game looks good enough to get all of the important information across well but is visually bland overall. The user interface is simple and inelegant with overwrought menus and overly-stylized fonts. The entire package just comes away feeling more like something we would have seen hit XBLA five years ago than something making its debut today.

Babel Rising game

From a singleplayer perspective, Babel Rising features a primary campaign as well as a number of score-based missions. The campaign is fairly straightforward and acts as a tutorial as well as a means of changing up some of the core mechanics, such as missions that take place on different towers featuring multiple pathways or certain workers that must not be killed.

While the campaign is fairly lengthy, it was so easy and many of the missions were so long that I found myself literally nodding off after a mission or two. The game features the extreme slow pace that plagues so many tower defense titles but fails to really have any satisfying leveling or upgrade mechanic that makes those games satisfying in the end. Additionally, the game features the kind of basic structure that can leave you losing a match after 10 or 15 minutes of doing quite well.

The game features singleplayer Kinect support when played on Xbox 360, but it is riddled with a number of problems. In my current living room setup, the game is entirely unplayable while sitting down. Even when I wasn’t moving at all, the cursor would quiver around, disappear and shoot across the screen randomly to the point where I could not even start a mission.

Upon standing, the Kinect works as intended but the gesture system controls awkwardly and makes the extremely easy game suddenly far too difficult just because you cannot switch between and use powers fast enough. You control the game’s cursor with your right hand and activate powers with your left by either moving your hand downward or jutting it out in front of you. To switch to a different element’s powers, you clap your hands together which simultaneously moves the cursor (and therefore the camera) and sometimes activates (and wastes) one of your powers due to your hand moving forward. It is simply not an enjoyable way to play the game.

Babel Rising game

Multiplayer is very straightforward, including both cooperative and competitive play. Cooperative play allows for two players to each take two of the game’s four elemental power sets and slow the construction of a single tower. Sadly, this cooperative mode is entirely separate from the campaign and is essentially just a survival mode in which you keep playing until you are defeated. This mode suffers from the same difficulty issues of the main game in which it is stunningly easy. My fiancé and I had to simply give up and let the workers just ascend the tower after about 20 minutes of holding them back because we were simply bored with the game (and appeared to be able to hold the workers off indefinitely).

Competitive play pits two players against identical waves of enemies on identical towers in which each player either fights to survive longer than the other or achieve the highest score within a certain timeframe. It is simple, straightforward and tends to be more difficult and faster-paced than the campaign and cooperative modes. Both multiplayer modes are a bit more enjoyable than the singleplayer aspects of the game, but their lack of any real depth and complete lack of online functionality (save leaderboards) makes it unlikely that I would stick to it for longer than just one or two matches.

Babel Rising is an extremely out of place game in the modern downloadable space. It’s cursor-based gameplay, sloth-like pacing and relatively one-note style makes it feel more like a slightly-upgraded flash game like we would have seen in the first years of XBLA and PSN rather than the creative and fully-fleshed titles we are used to seeing available for download today. After hearing the concept, I wanted this to be a puzzle game that hearkened back to the gameplay found in god games of the past (Populous, Black & White, etc.) but instead Babel Rising put me (almost literally) to sleep within the first few levels.

Babel Rising game

Levels regularly break the ten minute mark and while that may not seem so long, the game keeps the player waiting long enough between worker waves and the waves are so simple to defeat that even a single level can feel like a half hour or more has passed and you’ve done little more than just listen to a bunch of little cartoon workers scream incessantly as they die. In a post-tower defense world, there are many better and cheaper games out there that will give you a far more rewarding experience than Babel Rising. Unless of course, the experience you are looking for is a good excuse for a nap.

Our ratings for Babel Rising on Xbox 360 out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Presentation
60
Ugly user interfaces, overwrought menus and a basic cartoony style feel out of place for a modern downloadable title.
Gameplay
50
Basic gameplay works, but extremely slow levels lead to sleep rather than fun.
Single Player
55
A basic, linear (and story free) campaign is coupled with survival modes to generate the vast majority of the game's content.
Multiplayer
60
Head to head and cooperative levels suffer the same issues as the singleplayer but are more fun with a friend.
Performance
65
Broken and awkward Kinect integration coupled with hang ups on menus makes for a poor experience.
Overall
52
Slow-paced, overly easy and very boring, Babel Rising fails to impress on all fronts.
Comments
Babel Rising
Babel Rising box art Platform:
Xbox 360
Our Review of Babel Rising
52%
Mediocre
The Verdict:
Game Ranking
Babel Rising is ranked #1843 out of 1991 total reviewed games. It is ranked #138 out of 145 games reviewed in 2012.
1842. Aliens: Colonial Marines
PlayStation 3
1843. Babel Rising
1844. LocoCycle
Xbox One
Screenshots

Babel Rising
8 images added Jul 2, 2012 18:03
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