Babylon's Fall Preview

Babylon’s Fall has entered its third closed beta test, and I had the honour of trying out the game and seeing what progress has been made from the last one. It is good to see that the developers behind it have listened to player feedback regarding the game and made changes accordingly. Things like graphical enhancements and renaming confusing things, just to name a few.

The first thing I noticed when I booted up Babylon's Fall was the gorgeous music. Something that reminded me a whole lot of World of Warcraft tracks with a beautiful choir, the title screen set up quite the scene.

The graphics and character customisation are nothing to write home about, however. The images and videos provided certainly look prettier than in-game, and the customisation feels extremely lacking. I was incapable of creating the character I wanted to due to there being practically no darker skin shades in the game—I have no clue if there is an intention to add more later on in development. One good thing, however, is that players can change their character's physical appearance in the Sentinel Force Headquarters, by speaking to the character in the counter named "Gulra".

Aside from that, I'm not too sure about the intention for a story in Babylon's Fall. There was barely any form of dialogue in the closed beta test, so it's not something I will be commenting on. However, there is an in-depth article by Game Informer talking about it dating back to 2018.

Regardless of that, I was very excited to jump into the game and try out the fighting. Babylon's Fall main focus is co-op, and the quests are built as such (however, there was a change that allows for the quests to scale according to how many players there are). I played around with the settings, seeing if I could give a solo run a try to give information about that; alas, it wasn't implemented in this test. So without further ado, I got into my first quest.

I fought with the controls quite hard. Aside from there being no tutorial, and the character having four different weapons, the battle mostly resembled a hack-and-slash. I fought tooth and nail trying to not be the weakest link in the party. However, I was soon felled as I couldn't for the life of me realise how to use potions to heal myself because of the lack of tutorial. Not long after—in the following quest—I realized it was D-Pad up, for future reference.

Each quest is separated into different chapters. The longest I experienced was five different chapters within the quest, and for each chapter, you get awarded a medal. I never really understood why this was a thing, but I soon found out that it was rather easy to exploit it with the bow, doing aerial attacks and backstabs to get the higher medals.

Balancing is out of whack, and this is the first thing of many that sparks my worries for Babylon's Fall. It was easy to exploit the system, and soon I began seeing a pattern of people using the same weapons, with very little variety—I'm not sure if this spoke more about the balancing or the general fun of each of the weapons.

Soon, no one was using a sword nor a shield, but almost everyone had either a staff or a bow, and a hammer for special attacks—I fell into this category too. This meant that it was a bunch of us just shooting at the enemies, using our hammers as special attacks. This low amount of variety brewed worry within me for the lack of fun and/or balance that the game is experiencing. I hope that these issues are looked over and addressed, or it will become a case of everyone using the same weapons for everything.

 

My build consisted of right around the same. I used the hammer as my heavy attack to be able to lock down my foes, and then jump and shoot arrows. This meant I was constantly pressing A, Y, X, X, X, X, Y, and repeating the sequence. This allowed me to perma-stun any enemy I was fighting—including bosses—whilst also dishing out some damage with my aerial attacks, and ensuring that because I was using aerial attacks, along with some backstabs from the foes farther away from me, I was capable of getting high-ranking medals consistently.

Among my many runs, I tried using the quick-match to see what sort of players I would be paired with, and soon I was met with something I didn't like. I was matched with very high-level people, to the point where I was doing one (yes, one) damage to the enemy while getting three-shot. This led to my run depending mostly on me running away or using my hammer as lockdown so that I wouldn't be too much of a burden for my allies, because the quest was scaled for three players. This proved to me that Babylon's Fall has no matchmaking whatsoever, and I decided to continue making the lobbies henceforth.

In another one of these match-ups, two of my three allies used this hookshot to jump across a gap, and the other got stuck behind without knowing how to do it—since the game doesn't have a tutorial. I didn't even have a way to communicate to them how to get past the gap, which meant that for the rest of the run (three more chapters) the two others and I were outnumbered, while my other ally sat in the back wondering how to get to us.

And the worst part? I did more than a dozen quests and only got to experience three areas, one of them around seven or eight times. This didn't bode well for replayability, because despite having played this area countless of times, I still didn't have the gear nor level to advance further.

At the current state of things, Babylon's Fall feels like an unbalanced mess, with little incentive to keep playing; combat is very repetitive and boring, there is no customisation, and no reason to change your playstyle apart from the few fun weapons.

What do you think? Are you excited to play Babylon's Fall? Were you invited to this closed test? Let me know in the comments below, let's talk about it!