Babel Rising Review

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.

Your burning desire to teach mankind a lesson manifests as a wall of flames.

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.

It's a second flood of not-quite-biblical proportions.

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.