Babel Rising Review

Hi, I'm God. The Old Testament one, mind. Stop cowering, I'm not here to smite you. I'm in quite a good mood, actually. I'm in the same whimsical mood I was in when I invented that thing that makes dogs drag themselves across the floor with their back legs in the air. Brilliant, isn't it? No need to thank me. I'm infinite, I barely felt it.

I wrote the Bible, too. Well, I say wrote. I dictated it to some guys, like a beardy Barbara Cartland. My favourite story in the Bible is about the Tower of Babel. It's the story that definitively explains why humans talk different languages. Upshot, I did it. Again, you're welcome.

So there's this game, right. Babel Rising. It's like those tower defence games, only this time, you play Me, defending Heaven from an attacking tower. So what's that, tower attack-defence? Classifying things is hard. That's my fault, I keep creating weird stuff like that duck-billed platypus fella. Well, you get bored on Boxing Day, don't you?

So, it's your job, as me, to kill them (you). Select two elements from the four available and use the cripplingly limited options to destroy the workers before they get to add their carpentry efforts to the tower's completion. Each of your four attacks needs time to recharge, and that's what Babel Rising is - a cooldown management game. Letting your powers recharge for longer makes them more powerful, and when the humans are attacking from multiple angles it basically turns into a fatiguingly repetitive plate-spinning simulator.

The levels are too long. I mean, time means nothing to me, beyond a vague preference for doing it all in the right order. But I do appreciate dramatic pacing, and dropping new players into a series of sequential, overlong survival ordeals (with no way of skipping a particularly dull level) seems like the opposite of fun. And worse still, there's no progress. Look, I know I'm omnipotent, but that doesn't stop me wanting to level up, spend a few skill points, think up a new kind of plague. The humans get new stuff. It's like a one-legged arms race, that never once becomes entertaining.

Babel Rising has a seed of a good idea, but someone got the wrong element, and instead of watering that seed, they blew it. (Bit of element humour there, thank you very much.) And don't get me started on the Kinect implementation. If I wanted to have my movements and words completely misinterpreted and slavishly obeyed anyway, I'd have... oh, never mind.