Babel Rising Review

God can be a dick sometimes. I mean, did you ever hear about that time he decided to kill everybody in the Great Flood? How about the aftermath of this where the people of Earth thought they'd throw a big "screw you" to God and build a huge ass tower that would "reach unto heaven". Well, that's where Babel Rising comes in.

The story goes that the people of Earth (who, by the way, all spoke one language) were a bit peeved by the whole Great Flood debacle that they set upon building a tower to reach heaven, thus making a name for themselves and not being obliterated by their almighty. God then takes a nosey and see's them building said tower and realises that as one people who speak one language, nothing would be out of their reach and so confounded their speech and scattered them around the earth thus creating nationalities and different languages. Not being able to speak to each other meant they couldn't complete the now-named Tower of Babel (meaning a confused noise).

You start the game as God having just come down and realised that the people are building the tower. You are supplied with four elements, Earth, Water, Fire and Wind, to rain down destruction and terror upon these peons. You can only use two during a stage and this is usually selected for you. Each has a standard, advanced and ultimate attack. The standard and advanced attacks charge up over time and the ultimate attack charges by using the previous two. Using these different elements, you have to stop the peons from building up the Tower of Babel. If you're having trouble picturing the type of gameplay, think of a tower defense game but instead of placing towers, you're the sole tower trying to stop enemies from reaching an exit point but with every enemy that reaches the exit point, it stretches a bit further away (up the tower).

In essence, this game is okay for the most part, but after a while it feels more like you're trying to juggle whilst playing keep up as you constantly twist and turn the camera to different entrances that the builders flow out of. Most of the time I settled for a happy medium of sitting in one spot and letting one entrance build up their side of the tower until it reached my position before I smote them with my mighty smiting hammer. However, after the first few levels, nothing really changes. Occasionally your goal changes for the stage, for instance, killing a certain amount of peons or withstanding them for a certain amount of time, but it's the same concept. You're just killing little people over and over again to stop them from reaching the heavens. It's somewhat relaxing and stress relieving to kill these people and watch them fly off a tower (just me?) but after a while, it just becomes boring and your mind wanders, the thing is, there's nothing to wander to.

The graphics aren't the worst I've seen but they're very samey, only changed by your periodic attacks. The level never changes so it's always the same landscape. The colours are very bland and seem more fitting for my grandmother's living room than a game about killing things and regaining power.

You can take breaks from the main "campaign" with a survival mode but that is exactly what it sounds like, endless peons and you trying to survive. There is also a multiplayer option which allows you to either pit your godly skills against one another or work together but this also gets old pretty sharpish.

Overall, Babel Rising isn't anything special but it's worth a look if you like defense games. It's quite relaxing and you can switch your brain off and not lose but it's more the type of game that you jump in for 10/15 minutes, do one stage and then go and play something else. It's fun but didn't really live upto my expectations.