By Ned Jordan
Babel Rising takes its inspiration from the biblical story in which God put a
bunch of uppity humans in their place. In the game, you play as a god
watching down from the sky as your minions busily try to build a tower to
heaven, which, of course, is something that you have no intention of letting
them do. You have seven god powers at your disposal to stop them: a finger
tap of death, lightning, wind, tsunami, meteorites, and earthquake. The
minor powers vary a bit in different difficulty modes, but they work in
essentially the same way. As you can probably guess, these powers are dispatched
by various taps and sweeps of your fingers aimed at the little minions making
their way from the edge of the screen and up the tower to place the stone each
one carries above his head on the tower and bring it closer to you. The
more powerful the power, the longer it takes to recharge, so there's a bit of
strategy involved in when to unleash one of the more powerful ones. Most
of the powers have three levels, so if you hold off on using them until they
reach the third they are far more destructive - the difference between a basic
tsunami and a fully charged one is that the latter will clear workers off of
three levels of the tower instead of one. Most of the time you'll be using
the basic tap power to take out the masses of minions one at a time, though. To win the game, well, you never
win - it's just a question of how long you can survive before the minions
inevitably finish the tower and end your game. Your goal is to better your
score and then use OpenFeint to let your Facebook friends and Twitter followers
know about it.
During the first twenty seconds or so of the game you can do a pretty good
job of preventing the tower from growing, but after that the minions come so
quickly and in such great numbers that the end game is invariably a mad mess of
crazed finger taps and sweeps. There's a super power that lets you know
the tower down one level, but it takes so long to charge that you won't get to
use it in a game that often. None of the other powers affect the tower,
though, so once a stone is in place it's effectively in place for good.
Games never take too long to play, and even though they end relatively quickly
your finger and wrist will get quite a workout. It would have been nice if
the game were slightly slower paced and that you could do more to take out the
tower itself, but the game's charming graphics and light gameplay make it good
for a quick break now and then - it's certainly not a game you'll want to sit
and play for more than five or ten minutes at a time. If you're looking
for a fast-paced and short arcade style game it fits the bill, but if you want a
game with more depth and less repetition you'll have to look elsewhere.
Final Rating: 78%
