Perhaps you remember the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel.
Discouraged by the flood that wiped out most of humankind and not
convinced that they should believe God's promise to never again flood
the planet, Noah's descendants began to build a tower that they hoped
would stretch to the heavens. The rationale was that if they put
themselves out of reach of rising waters, they could live like they
wanted without fear of reprisal. As the humans built that tower, God
grew displeased and sent warnings in the form of lightning strikes that
dismantled its uppermost reaches. Still the workers persisted. Finally,
God scrambled everyone's speech patterns. Stupefied by their failure to
communicate with one another, the workers scattered. Their efforts to
construct the tower were abandoned.
Babel Rising tells that story in a more interactive form. You assume the
role of God, and your job is to prevent the humans from constructing
the famous tower. You're not ready to scramble brains just yet, though.
Instead, you punish as many workers as possible, frying them with
electrical bolts, blowing them every which way with howling winds,
toasting them with fire, and drowning them in massive floods. Clearly,
the game's developers took some liberties with the original story.
The game offers several control options and encourages play using the
Kinect hardware. You might suppose that means the Kinect is the best way
to play, but you're actually better off grabbing a standard controller.
With the Kinect enabled, you spend too much of your time thinking about
how you're supposed to move your body to issue commands, and any
calibration issues are a huge deal because of the amount of activity and
precision that are required to keep on top of things. Because no proper
buttons are available when motion controls are used, the developers had
to get creative. The result is even more work for you. For instance,
you have to clap your hands each time you want to switch between skills
instead of simply pressing a face button that corresponds to the ability
you'd like to summon. Going controller free might have seemed like a
good idea, but the setup is more frustrating than cool.
Once you start playing a stage, whether with the Kinect or with a
standard controller, you find that you have some suitably awesome powers
at your disposal. You can bring two out of four available elemental
affinities with you into any stage (typically the two available are
decided by the game on your behalf), and each of those affinities
affords you two unique abilities and a related supreme power. For
instance, the earth affinity lets you drop small boulders on the
workers, crushing one at a time, or you can occasionally churn soil in a
short wave and slaughter a few laborers in a line that you determine.
Once you charge that ability by using its weaker variations long enough,
you can drop a massive boulder on the tower, and it will roll down and
crush workers on the lower levels. Even standard abilities come with a
cooling period that must be considered, which prevents you from being
able to rely too much on any one skill. You need to switch abilities
constantly if you want to keep slaughtering the workers who are
purposefully attempting to construct the tower, and if you want to keep
score multipliers in effect.
At first, that effort shouldn't prove difficult. Though the workers are
persistent, they're not especially bright. They just march forward like
mindless drones, and as long as you keep killing them, they won't be
able to add much to the tower. However, they get sneakier once you
advance a few stages into the game. You start seeing trouble-making
priests among the rabble, for instance. They walk around with colored
aura barriers shielding them from certain elemental attacks, so you have
to hit them with specific attacks to do any damage. Other workers carry
cursed urns. If you attack a worker, you break the urn and unleash a
purple mist. That mist temporarily prevents you from continuing to use
whatever ability broke the urn, which can be an absolute disaster. The
urns are difficult to avoid destroying, too, because they're carried by
raving lunatics who rush up the tower and gleefully run into your flames
if you happen to drop an inferno on the scene. That sort of situation
has a tendency to feel cheap, since there's not much you can do to
prevent it.
There are other complications as well. The workers occasionally roll
mobile towers up near their construction and start unloading additional
workers until you destroy the towers. Such an occurrence can turn the
tide rather quickly if you're not paying close attention. Depending on
the objective for a given stage, you may also be required to sink ships
at sea. Every few minutes, another fleet approaches, and you can switch
to a view of the docks, where you can launch blazing fireballs and
hopefully sink most or all of the approaching ships. Since the vessels
move quickly, you have to anticipate their path and aim for the water
ahead of them. If you miss the mark too many times and the level
objective is to sink a set number of vessels, that can mean you are
stuck trying to survive against the workers for another several minutes
just so you can last long enough for an extra wave of ships to arrive.
Babel Rising grows tiresome quickly. Whether you're being asked to reach
a certain score, endure for a set amount of time, or avoid smashing a
certain number of urns, the stages play out in essentially the same
manner. Since most stages can last for some time--sometimes well over 10
minutes per attempt--you can become frustrated just a few levels into
the campaign (especially when controls or funky camera get in the way).
The visual design is nicely done, with well-animated laborers and
attractive texture work that lends the proceedings a cheery vibe even
when you're frying mortals to a crisp, but the music is too simple and
repetitive, and the limited selection of tower designs can't keep things
interesting for long. Even the option of local competitive and
cooperative play for you and a friend fails to impress, since seeing
everything becomes more difficult with the screen split down the middle.
It's a shame there's no online option.
Babel Rising benefits from a unique core idea that provides a solid
foundation, but it doesn't build on that in an interesting manner. A
cheery visual presentation and a variety of skills help a little bit,
but you won't have to play for long before you've seen most of what the
game has to offer. The available Survival mode is nice if you want to
challenge yourself, but it's difficult to remain enthusiastic about
playing the game for long stretches of time, and that will likely keep
the available leaderboards from inspiring you and any rivals. You'll
find the start of a good game here, but like the Tower of Babel itself,
the end product feels unfinished.
