![]() Who are you to judge me, Babylon’s Fall? Maybe I’ll give you an award after every combat section. Maybe I’m overly sensitive but I always feel personally attacked by this performance award bullshit. And also it’s difficult to time my dodges well when your visuals keep making my eyelids reflexively slam shut. But in my defense, Platinum Games, you’ve thrown an awful lot at me in one go to get my head around. And in the grand Yahtzee playing Platinum Games tradition, I invariably got stone every fucking time. So with four attack buttons and a jump and a dodge we defeat each serving of generic baddies and then in the grand Platinum Games tradition get an award for our performance. To achieve this we have the ability to equip four different weapons at a time – one in the light attack hand, one in the heavy attack hand, and two ghost ones that hover awkwardly behind you like two Comicon attendees who’ve just noticed an attractive woman. The tutorial section walks us through the first, last and only gameplay thread of Babylon’s Fall: go to the next room and murder whatever baddies show up. Once you’re through the nine levels of DRM hell the game opens with the protagonist getting conscripted into some kind of militia and told that their job is to work their way through all the levels of the tower of Babylon in order to finally defeat the blue meanies and presumably in some way profit. They might be a few years too early for the PS3 nostalgia wave when brown and bloom will come back into fashion and we must resignedly headbutt the nearest wrought iron fence spike, but someone’s got to be the pioneer.” So I gave it a chance, and swiftly determined that Babylon’s Fall hasn’t so much gotten ahead of its time as gotten ITS head on a subway track. There’s nothing wrong with eschewing the ridiculous graphical standards of today in favour of a deliberately retro look. But I figured “Hey, have some faith, Yahtzee, this is Platinum Games, they of Bayonetta and Nier Automata and that Anarchy Reigns thing they probably hope no one will ever bring up again. I thought the download size was suspiciously small. It even has a classic case of cheaping out on the cutscenes by just panning over still images with increasingly agonizing slowness. It looks like a PS3 game, all brown and flatly lit with characters textured and animated like a papier mache diorama about kitchen utensils. This looks like shit.” View Full TranscriptĪs in, it literally resembles faecal matter, decked out mostly in glistening browns except for a streak of vibrant blue from an accidentally swallowed whiteboard marker. But eventually I got through it all and when I was on the other side of the metal detector putting my shoes back on and admiring the new tag they’d punched through my ear I cast a look around and thought to myself “Oooh. What the fuck possible benefit do you imagine I’d extract from signing up for another fucking account, Square Enix, other than one more excuse to never check my email? Christ, this is like trying to get through airport security with an inflatable novelty suitcase nuke. Got past that and Babylon’s Fall still wouldn’t unbutton its top until I also signed into a Square Enix account. First it wouldn’t even start without a PS Plus subscription, even though I only wanted to play single player because y’know, humanity, it’s like a highway bypass: I understand why it needs to exist but I’d rather not have one in my house. I tried out Babylon’s Fall, Platinum’s new live service hack and slashathon on PS5, or had a crack at it if you will, not that it made it easy. Or indeed something that fell out of a crack. So far this quarter’s been dropping out heavy hitters like a trapdoor in a domestic violence shelter, but we find ourselves in an in-betweeny sort of week so let’s look at something that might have fallen through the cracks. We have a merch store as well! Visit the store for brand new ZP merch. Want to watch Zero Punctuation ad-free? Sign-up for The Escapist + today and support your favorite content creators! This week in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Babylon’s Fall.įor more major games Yahtz has reviewed lately, check out Horizon Forbidden West, Elden Ring, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and Dying Light 2.
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