Babel Rising

I was looking at this title so I thought I would give it a try, and if you haven't guessed it already this post is to share with everyone what I thought of it based on what I have played so far, which I believe was around level six.

This game has you prevent workers from building a tower in an attempt to reach the heavens, a game based on a story most people have heard about already. You can choose two from four elements: earth, fire, wind, and water to stop the workers from building or maybe even deal damage to the tower. You can use spells anytime you want, but waiting until they are fully charged will cause more damage.

Unfortunately, while the game seems to have been made for the casual player in mind, the game is unforgiving. Casting spells before they are fully charged does very little, and even fully charged spells hardly do any damage to the tower that a single worker cant fix. While this did not bother me much since the objective isn't usually to STOP them from building it, only to meet some sort of objective before they can finish, let me share with you what caused me to quit the game (for now). Around level six, you are tasked with destroying around 72 ships that are attempting to deliver stones for the construction of the tower. These ships come in waves of four, with about 12 ships on each wave (eight on the first one). The problem was that waves two and after sometimes spawned ships almost right next to the harbor they needed to reach to be safe, allowing the ships to almost instantly get to the harbor safely while you miss with your shot that takes a moment to travel to the target while you try to stop the other 11 ships in the wave.

Now there is difficulty and there is bullshit difficulty. The former is the kind that gives you a challenge that you can get through with knowledge, skill, and a little bit of practice, the latter is the kind that lets the game dish out a cheap shot and forces you to replay the level in order to make the game seem longer than it really is. While missing a ship or two does not fail the level right away, the ever increasing wave of workers do not allow for failure, and typically if you do not kill all the ships the first time they appear you will not have the chance to see the extra wave.

Overall, I am a bit disappointed with this purchase for reasons stated and not stated. I may intend on taking another look at this game and if I do, I will make another post about it. Until then, my next post may be about the spaceship roguelike game FTL.