Let’s get this out of the way right from the beginning: Babylon’s Fall is a live-service game through and through. That’s either enough to make you walk out the door right now, or continue reading because Platinum Games, of Bayonetta fame, are the developers and you’re curious to see what they’ve brought to the table.
Babylon’s Fall is an odd duck of a game. An action RPG with a fully-featured story befitting a traditional game while still trying to swim in the live service waters. Sadly, the story is nonsensical and the live service design does the game no favours at all.
Set in Neo Babylon, you play an unwilling conscript in an age’s long war for the actual Tower of Babylon, a nightmare structure looming over Neo Babylon. Without your consent, a parasitical device that bestows great power upon its user – The Gideon Coffin – is forced on you. Now a Sentinel in the Emperors army, it’s your job to storm the tower of Babylon, extinguish the Blue Sun to stop a sickness called the Blue Death, while dealing with monsters called Galu. All in the name of been freed from your Coffin.
Told mostly through a series of still paintings and cutscenes, Babylon’s Falls story smooshes a whole bunch of different mythologies together without ever explaining anything. By the end of the campaign, I still wasn’t sure how everything fit together. There’s something in there about the end of the world and the birth of a new one for. . . reasons?? There’s a lore timetable, but it isn’t presented in-game. If you want to know more, you’re going to have to go online to read it, which is a terrible way to present lore to your game or to give your players context.
Level design, as well, is a big miss since, quite honestly, there isn’t any. The levels are designed to be finished in relatively short bursts and are just corridors into an arena into a corridor until you reach the end which either has one of the few interesting boss fights scattered across the campaign or just a whole bunch of tougher enemies you have to defeat.
When creating your Sentinel, which you’re limited to two per account that can’t be deleted, you can pick a Faction that seems to determine your class as DPS, Tank or Ranged. The interesting wrinkle to Babylon’s Falls combat is that your Gideon Coffin lets you wield and use four weapons at the same time with a load out of your choosing, which seems to me to really determine how you play.
You have two hand weapons and two Spectral weapons wielded by your Coffins tendrils. There are five weapons: swords, hammers, shields, bows and magic staffs. You have an SP bar that is essentially a Stamina bar that handles your dodge mechanic along with your spectral attacks. The SP slowly regenerates over time but can be recharged through the use of melee attacks.
Initially, the combat felt awkward and not Platinum’s best combat system to date. But once I got used to the flow of combat and that dodging was also useful to close the gaps between enemies or follow up on knockback attacks, it became incredibly fun while revealing a surprising amount of depth. Ideally, you should always have a party of four in Babylon’s Fall as, initially, you’re weak and the game’s enemies are bullet sponges. Once you’ve started to level up and are partnered with four players who know what they’re doing, it’s addictively fun to watch enemy waves melt beneath your assault. Of course, you can go it alone, but expect a much tougher fight until you’ve got some decent gear and levels on you.
How strong you are is determined by your overall character level and your combined gear levels, as in most live service or action games these days. Gear comes in a variety of levels from standard to rare to godlike, denoted by the gears icon colour and how many perks it has. Gear perks are incredibly important to having a good build. While it’s not well explained, as with most of the game’s systems and aspects, you’ll be able to figure out what each perk does. So far the best build I’ve found is an HP Regen Vampire build, letting you heal slowly over time while sucking health away from enemies in combat. And it’s a build you can get quite early on in the campaign. One downside is that, like a certain other live service game, you’re only allowed to wear one yellow godlike piece of gear.
And if you’re after loot, there’s a whole lot of it dropping, though I did find the amount of loot dropped towards the end of the campaign was geared more towards crafting materials than weapons.
At a certain point in the game, new mechanics will be opened up such as crafting, melding items, enhancing them and enhancing your Coffins perks. The problem is that they come too late to be of any real use in the campaign and seemed geared more towards the endgame side. Once you’ve beaten the campaign, you’ll unlock three different playstyles for your weapons based on how you roll combos. There are Standard, Power and Technical which can be chosen for each weapon type when you equip it. Opening these up after you’ve completed the main game is a bad idea, as is unlocking crafting so late because they would have been really useful towards the end of the campaign when levelling up slows to a near crawl.
As well, you’ll unlock new game modes in the form of Skirmishes, Sieges and Duals. These make up the endgame side of Babylon’s Fall with much tougher enemies to defeat but, ultimately, they’re just harder versions of the campaign levels – outside of Sieges which are just wave arena fights – with a named enemy popping in randomly. Playing them at least once is recommended as a first-time completion can net you valuable crafting bits and Blueprints for new armour and weapons. But if you want to continue levelling and gaining gear levels, you’re going to have to start grinding these.
Within the Hub you can change your weapons and pick up optional objectives along with visiting merchants, crafting and changing your looks. There are daily, weekly and monthly objectives as well which reward you with Battlepass points and items. Once you accept a quest, you can’t change your loadout, not even during the mission. What you’re picking up can only be seen at the end of the level when you decrypt the gearboxes.
Finally, there’s the BattlePass which comes in two flavours: standard and premium. The standard version is so bare it’s laughable. The Premium version for Season 1 is free but from Season 2 you’re going to have to shell out real-world currency to pick it up. The bulk of what you unlock is cosmetics and crafting materials. In-game purchases that require premium, real-world currency also seem to be mostly skewed towards the cosmetic spectrum. I can’t say I specifically see pay to win situation here, but then, I also didn’t spend much time looking at it. I haven’t played a live service game yet in which I’d sink real-world money outside of the initial game purchase. So it’s there and you can ignore it. Of course, you may want to when it comes to one of Babylon’s Falls other sore point. . .
. . . The game’s visuals. To say that Babylon’s Fall is an acquired visual taste is an understatement. Platinum Games have tried to make the game look like an oil painting, mostly through the use of what appears to be a filter. Instead, it makes the repetitive scenery and character models look very old. Like early PS3 games old. I’m assuming it’s a filter instead of specifically creating textures and models to suite the art style because sometimes the filter doesn’t seem to activate revealing far better-looking models than what you’re staring at the rest of the time. Over the course of time, I’ve mostly gotten used to the visuals but lord knows its visual style isn’t going to be pulling you towards the game.
From a technical standpoint, Babylon’s Fall runs really well. Load times are fast, netcode seems stable, cross-play is stable and combat is quick and responsive. Of course, with such a low player count it’s difficult to really judge just how well it would run on stressed servers.
Babylon’s Fall doesn’t do anything different – or better – than other live service games. Everything you would expect to find in the genre: crafting, microtransactions, repetitive missions, a focus on bland endgame content rather than one good campaign, is here. It’s the perfect style of game to switch your brain off to and do your daily pick up and play sessions. The combat, however, is actually really fun, especially if you’re playing with three other players and I do feel that is one thing that Babylon’s Fall does get right.
But between its visuals and the feeling that consumers are finally starting to get tired of a genre that’s treating them as endless coin purses to be emptied, it may not stand much of a chance. Platinum Games are already busy creating Season 3 content for the game, but it’s not clear how long the game will survive to begin with.
Now while I dislike the lazy, repetitive level design endemic to love service multiplayer games, I did enjoy my time with Babylon’s Fall, mostly due to the fun combat system that plays to my aggressive playstyle. The endgame content, however, just leaves me feeling cold and I can’t say how much of that I will sink my time into the outside of the occasional daily mission to complete.
As I stated before, Babylon’s Fall is an odd duck of a game whose combat I enjoyed but whose non-existent level design left me cold. There’s a better game lurking beneath the design by committee feel that this, and other live service games, have. It’s past time that this particular design template underwent a reboot.
- Publisher: Square Enix
- Developers: PlatinumGames, Square Enix
- Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Microsoft Windows
Reviewed on the Playstation platform PS4
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