Babel Rising Reviews

  • Vorpal SmilodonVorpal Smilodon259,812
    02 Oct 2012 02 Oct 2012
    13 2 0
    Babel Rising is a Kinect-enabled (but not required) defense game - playing as God you throw down water, earth, wind and fire at heathen construction workers attempting to build a temple.
    quick note: This review is from a semi-skilled gamer who played the game single-player only without kinect

    Gameplay:
    The game is shallow, but fun. It shouldn't take anyone going for them longer than five hours to complete the game and harvest all of the achievements - luckily this is about the exact amount of time the act of raining brimstone down on these innocent little lemmings keeps its appeal.

    The controls (on the controller) work quite well - at the beginning of each mission you get two of the four elements as your toolset. A and Y each get a spot destruction spell and X and Y get a trail destruction spell. Each kill with an element earns you mana towards that element's Ultimate. A pretty neat system, but the 'skill' required comes from the fact that the base skills recharge slowly and go through three levels of charging, the highest charge being significantly superior to the base level of the spell. Basically you want to use you attacks strategically so you have enough time to charge them up without the little workers building any more of the tower.

    Later in the game it adds cursed jars that freeze out spells on you if you destroy them, and priests that protect against a certain element - these are the only elements that make the game challenging since you can leak considerably if you let your spells all be cursed at once.

    Overall however the game is extremely easy - experienced gamers are unlikely to lose more than one level, of which the game has merely fifteen.

    Oddly there is a boat smashing minigame occasionally that doesn't seem to affect anything and can be skipped past except on one level where you need to kill 72 boats. I have no idea what the point of it is...

    Graphics/Sound:
    Summed up easily as passable - basic cellshaded graphics that work as needed. Music and sound are unimpressive but not bad. The only annoyance is that it's sometimes difficult to tell which color a priests shield happens to be.

    Story:
    There only story is in text blurbs in the level select - small paragraphs that say something like "time to kill some priests" - aka there's no story to be had.

    Replay Value:
    Low to none - I don't see myself ever playing this again, solely because it was so easy in the first place, and no additional difficulties are offered.

    Achievements:
    Easy! A couple require a second controller, but after playing through the 'story mode' you're unlikely to have more than a couple to wrap up and none of the are hard or take long.

    Overall:
    This game is a bit of fun and unlike any other game on the 360. However, unless you get it at a discount, the length and depth leave a lot to be desired.

    price
    This review was made when the game cost 800MSP, but I picked it up on sale for 400MSP. Take that into consideration.
    comments
    Leave a comment if the review disappoints - if I've forgotten to mention anything I'll be happy to add on or clarify.
    2.0
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