Babylon’s Fall (PS5)

Babylon’s Fall is a failure, and that’s not me starting my analysis of the game’s quality. As a product, the action role-playing game Babylon’s Fall is an online cooperative multiplayer game meant to have multiple years of content released over time, but since it failed to catch fire, this live service game’s life was cut prematurely short. While its contents don’t necessarily demand online play, Babylon’s Fall will become unplayable on February 28th of 2023, and figuring out where the blame should fall for this premature death is a tough question to answer. It could be publisher Square Enix’s unreasonably high definition of success not being met, it could have been developer Platinum Games’s inexperience with multiplayer games not letting the concept take shape well, or it could have been a rather weak marketing campaign that meant few were invested in checking the game out during its lifetime. Of course, one factor that would inevitably play some importance is the game’s actual design and entertainment value, so before it became unplayable, I made sure to see what we’ll soon be missing from Babylon’s Fall.

In the fantasy world of Babylon’s Fall, the ancient Babylonians built a monumentally massive Ziggurat towards the sky before their mysterious disappearance, this Ziggurat soon believed to be the host of all sorts of treasure and ancient secrets. A modern empire aims to climb it to find these fabled riches, but the Gallu warriors within and other dangers dissuade them, and so they begin to recruit less desirable people like ex-criminals to try and clear out the tower and find anything of value. Dubbed Sentinels, the player arrives at the Ziggurat as once such conscripted warrior, a vent-like device placed on their back called the Gideon’s Coffin that forces compliance but gives them unusual extra abilities to assist in battle as they head through the various cloisters of the Ziggurat. Your playable character, while the most promising Sentinel yet in the game’s story, is not really the guiding force for much of the progression. A fellow Sentinel named Sylvi ends up becoming almost the protagonist, voicing her dissatisfaction with the situation but also fighting onwards because those who have taken up residence at the Ziggurat’s base are afflicted with a lethal disease caused by the Blue Sun found in the tower’s higher reaches. Lycus, a young man with the affliction, ends up an important motivator for progressing, and some of the members of the Empire’s forces soon show themselves to be less the arms of a domineering empire and more human individuals who see the complexity of what you discover as you climb the tower. Sophia, your main commander, understands the need for action outside orders, and Ishum, an armored old man, is a mysterious but delightfully friendly fellow helped by the slightly askew performance of his voice actor David Annen.

The cast of characters remains reasonably condensed and while sometimes the story takes a predictable course, it has enough to the people you get to know and the trials they undergo as they accompany you up the Ziggurat that it becomes worth investing some attention into. Some of its storytelling potential is damaged a bit by the way things are presented though. Babylon’s Fall has a rather unjustified oil painting art style it applies in a sporadic manner. Most of the time its influence on the environmental design is imperceptible unless you stop and look for the brushwork effects layered over things, but at others the art style suddenly is applied in such a thick layer it looks completely incongruous with the previous moment. Story cutscenes can be told in real time, but a few are presented in an odd manner where you flit between painted frames that have characters standing still as they talk and shifting in an odd manner to the next pose with no animation connecting the actions. At times these are close to the game’s usual graphical style and at others it looks almost like the game is rendering improperly because of the painting effect being far too strong, but there are a few moments where a specific visual can nicely apply the aesthetic, not that such rare successes are worth the sloppier implementation at other parts.

Despite the name, Babylon’s Fall is also a mishmash of actual Mesopotamian concepts that fit the title and Greco-Roman influence that perhaps gets an undue amount of focus. Gates to new parts of the tower are named for Roman gods, a Babylonian device in the game invokes the name of Icarus, and the merchant you interact with is called Pygmalion and has a little companion named Galatea. Enemies are more often named in line with Babylonian myth like the Gallu and Udug while Ishum at least refers to his god as Dingir, the Sumerian word for a deity, but this really isn’t so much an issue with the game so much as a missed opportunity to plumb the depths of a less explored mythology. The Empire you’re assisting seems almost like it’s meant to evoke Greco-Roman concepts so that almost smooths over some of the influence, but what is a bit more disappointing is the environmental design seeming to abandon the Ziggurat concept a little bit in. The first two cloisters you’re exploring feel like they could be part of the towering structure, the first feeling like a ruined section of an ancient society while the second is a den of thieves with tighter streets and even some flooded sections you plunge into briefly despite the water not having much of an effect on how battles unfold. After one of the better designed boss battles though you’ll start heading to places in the Ziggurat that feel like they are just natural environments, the Volcanic Cloister a lava-filled cave and areas like the icy mountains not even reading well as something still found on a man-made structure. A token bit of the environment might have some sign of artificiality, but it feels like the later spaces didn’t want to embrace the premise in their design much despite the need for environmental variety justifying breaking away from a focus on just urban spaces. The areas at least roll out new hazard considerations to make traversal not just a matter of pressing forward to fight new monsters and the late game takes a reasonable approach to justifying its last environmental shifts so the Ziggurat concept isn’t completely irrelevant.

Babylon’s Fall has you setting out on individual quests from a hub city at the Ziggurat’s base, this area allowing you to buy equipment or recruit up to three human players as allies to tackle a mission in your cloister of choice before teleporting back to the hub even when it doesn’t make sense in the story to do so. While there are some loose monsters to fight on missions, for the most part battles will take place in what the game calls Chapters, a set assortment of enemies appearing to be fought and when the conflict is over, you’ll get a rating based on your performance in regards to things like speed, damage taken, and how many hits you landed on a foe. This can influence your rewards, but as you develop your Sentinel, the highest ranking of Pure Platinum becomes easy to achieve even on your own. The Gideon’s Coffin affixed to your back allows you to wield two weapons with ethereal tendrils in addition to two weapons you can carry in hand, each of your weapons having a set button you can press to unleash an attack. Square is your fast attack, triangle provides a heavy hit, and your two shoulder buttons are your Gideon weapons, different weapons having different effects based on which button they’re assigned to. This is actually a battle format with some promising potential at first, the player able to find out how they want to equip their character to handle different situations. Square is naturally a good button for your main attacking tool like a sword for swift strikes, but you can set something like a gun or bow to your other buttons if you want to hurt an enemy from afar. Melee weapons like the hammer can smash foes hard while used by the Gideon’s Coffin without having you slowed down when using them, and having something like an axe set to it instead will let you sweep around to hit multiple foes to avoid being crowded. There is definitely room for this battle style to become a complex system where you can swap your approach on the fly, but there are quite a few ideas tied to it that squander its promise and lead to Babylon’s Fall’s true issues.

Babylon’s Fall does a poor job not only teaching you about the ways to utilize your weapons, but it even denies you a wider range of abilities and customization until you are fairly deep into this action RPG’s story. Mixing attacks and directional presses can switch up your attacks some, but it’s not until you’ve actually finished the story does the game finally give you the ability to vary up your fighting style. While you can charge all your weapon attacks, only after the plot is done and you’ve moved into extra content can you switch to a style based on heavy powerful swings or a rhythmic focus where you need to time strikes just right but for high returns. Things like enchanting and enhancing armor are kept from the player for quite a while as well but they aren’t quite as important as a way to actually vary up the combat, because while Babylon’s Fall does seem to have a decent spread of monster types initially, soon it becomes clear very few of them need to be approached carefully. After a while you can often just throw yourself into the midst of combat, hammer your quick attack and shoulder buttons, and clear the fight with the best rating while quickly killing all monsters and suffering little damage. Making this a more effective strategy is the fact that sustained aggression can cause an enemy to stagger, preventing them from attacking for a time and sometimes the spacing between staggers is small enough you can invalidate even the stronger monsters just with constant aggression. While you pick a class near the start of the game, it doesn’t seem to matter too much in terms of this method’s efficacy for a good deal of the experience nor does it really lead to players assuming different roles in co-op since fight design doesn’t really demand any advanced tactics. Each class does get a single unique ability that might not even help much once they’re finally unlocked, but even if a foe does manage to put up a fight or lands a lucky hit, you are given a set of potions per mission to use any time for a quick heal and a good deal of revives as well that are slow to activate but mean you can brute force things even more.

There is an equipment system to consider though, and if you aren’t well equipped fights will start to actually demand a bit of attention again. You aren’t inundated with too much loot during a mission, but taking a look at your haul after a mission is actually a more involved process than just slapping on the gear with the highest numbers. While your character themselves levels up at an incredibly slow rate, you won’t even hit double digits before finishing the story, the equipment level is what determines your efficacy, although even if you’re underpowered for a mission and going solo sometimes the right Gideon’s Coffin setup is still enough to trivialize battles. Equipment does range in the types of effects they provide and how they emphasize different stats, the player asked to choose how much they value something like defense over SP and SP regeneration. SP, short for Spirit Power, is how you use your Gideon’s Coffin weapons and is built up through causing damage. If you can’t keep a good supply of it you will have to actually participate in the battle a bit more, progress in Babylon’s Fall often a set of statistical islands where you might not have the SP regen or equipment level required and thus a moment requires more attention only for it to slip back into the more common experience of mindless battle until an incongruity arises again. Unfortunately, you cannot re-equip in the middle of a quest, meaning if you want to try something out it might become a burden instead when it doesn’t click and perhaps even worse, when you enter later areas and elemental resistances come into play, you might be saddled with a weapon that can’t do any damage at all because of its enchantment. The measured distribution of loot means you can sometimes spend a long time before you find certain types of weapons with the appropriate strength for your place in the game or ones that do not have a debilitating elemental affinity for the current cloister, but even being a full weapon down doesn’t prevent some battles from being empty exchanges.

There is some particularly excellent boss music with a good deal of gravitas and choral vocals, but after finishing the story, the post-game mostly just goes on to recycle familiar areas and enemies without the kind of shake-ups needed to make continuing on all that compelling. The actual live service elements thus feel a strange addition, co-op already not much of a necessity since the fights mostly just ask for somewhat attentive dodging like when a boss unleashes a tide of energy bullets but not much strategy beyond that. The extra content you could purchase is inaccessible at the time of writing and were mostly cosmetic despite the game not even allowing much communication with other players beyond emotes, but the game overall feels like its stapling on extra ideas that harm some action with potential. Creative boss designs come up that would work if the game was balanced for solo play only and focusing more on fleshing out abilities and weapon synergies could draw out more from the gameplay, but instead Babylon’s Fall is often struggling to shove ideas in while forgetting to flesh out important basics to make it satisfying to play.

THE VERDICT: Babylon’s Fall has a lot of ideas that look compelling but don’t pass muster after the honeymoon period is over. The four weapon system is shallower than it initially seems, especially since enemies don’t demand enough out of you much of the time to justify needing to think about your particular set-up all that much. Boss battles can have excellent music and attacks that look like they should demand strategy, but there is too much forgiveness in place that robs such conflicts of some of their danger. The decent story can sustain a few moments where the fights become almost mindless due to the game’s mismanagement of the player’s power level, but the adventure feels empty overall thanks to a lack of combat depth and complexity since Babylon’s Fall doesn’t commit to any of its promising ideas strongly enough.

And so, I give Babylon’s Fall for PlayStation 5…

A BAD rating. While some boss battles can drag on because they take a while to whittle down the health bar rather than providing a truly difficult fight, Babylon’s Fall is at least weak in how it designs encounters rather than making them agonizing barriers to pushing towards things that have a better chance of being a bit entertaining. Some skirmishes will ask you to be a bit more careful, especially if your SP regen isn’t the best, and the boss battles can at least have a lot of creative attacks and great music even if they still aren’t asking for a higher level of play. The story unfortunately is unfinished since it left some loose ends hanging to develop in future expansions that will now never come, but there are at least some threads worth following in what we’re left with. The art direction can work well when it commits to an idea but the game looks sloppy when it doesn’t know how to apply its oil painting filter or it loses faith in the Ziggurat idea and Babylonian theming, but mostly the issues will always tie back to the fact the game had a battle system that could have been layered but instead each weapon you equip boils down to a button you’ll probably be hammering against enemies not smart enough or sturdy enough to oppose you even in solo play. You’ll get some moments that provide a bit of a challenge in terms of managing the enemy group or staying fleet of foot, but they don’t inject enough life in between the stagnant skirmishes and the environmental hazards aren’t going to pick up the slack since they’re mostly there so progressing between Chapters isn’t just walking forward unopposed. Babylon’s Fall is in desperate need of extra abilities and techniques that diversify your fighting style as well as foes who could demand breaking away from basic tactics. Removing some of your abundant safety nets like the potions and revives could also at least make you take some threatening foes more seriously rather than shrugging when they do land some damage, but Babylon’s Fall doesn’t develop any ideas too strongly and even delays some that could have injected a touch of life had they come sooner.

It’s very easy to see a version of Babylon’s Fall that is effective since mostly it would just need to shake off the problem with combat stagnation. Some elements like its odd art direction choices at one point are balanced out by effective execution elsewhere, but when the gameplay crux is so flimsy it can be boiled down to button mashing even against foes intended to be powerful, other elements like some decent story beats are left without the support they need to carry the game forward. Both sides of the battle would need to be improved, both giving players more options on how to fight and making foes sturdy enough to take it without constantly staggering in addition to having attacks you need to treat with respect. However, Babylon’s Fall won’t have the time to adjust its design, because making a bad impression at the start ended up tanking its prospects. Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, a similar action RPG under Square Enix’s umbrella, avoided many of the pitfalls Babylon’s Fall ends up in while playing in a somewhat similar manner, so there is at least a possible replacement for it. It is still a shame to see a game disappear, especially one that just needed to trim down extraneous monetization elements to focus on solidifying its core mechanics. Babylon’s Fall is not so awful is deserved to be so quickly dispensed with, but it’s not like it was some unappreciated masterpiece crushed under corporate considerations. We are worse off seeing it go partly because there’s no reason it had to have design elements that will make it completely inaccessible once serves go offline, but it’s not exactly a game you need to snatch up before it’s gone to see what it has to offer.