Since its announcement, I am Babylon's Fall with a puzzled eye. Initially well-hyped, I was gradually cooled by seeing the latest communications from Square Enix. It must be said that between the announcement trailer and the launch trailer, there is quite a gap. Whether or not, despite its sketchy visual style, the game manages to be interesting remains to be seen. Answer in the following lines.
You can change your character's appearance free of charge via an NPC in the central HUB.
We start the game on a ship, with a host of characters, who are, like us, prisoners of the Empire. Rather than executing us summarily, the guards make us pass a seemingly simple ordeal, the placing of a device on our back, Gideon's chest... which will bind to us and grant us, if successful, the powers of a Sentinel. While most of the prisoners lose their lives, a few "chosen ones" manage to endure merging with the parasitic artifact. As you can imagine, our character is part of the lot, so it's up to us to climb the many floors of the tower of Babylon to discover its secrets and put an end to the curse of the Blue Sun which is ruining the lives of a good number of citizens. Then follows a tutorial of about ten minutes which presents the basic mechanics of the title.
The heaviness of the first few minutes diminishes as you develop your powers, and you find yourself from the first scripted mission able to use 4 weapons simultaneously. The powers of the Chest indeed grant the wearer the ability to use ghost weapons, which draw on a power gauge that gradually recharges, dodging blows and managing to hit targets with their standard attacks. Curiously, the game turns out to be dynamic and really pleasant, and not as nag as you might think at first glance. The first missions are achievable alone without worries, then the elements will be introduced, with monsters that will be resistant to some, while others will be their weaknesses. From that moment on, don't expect to get out of it alone, although the game offers (see strength in the absence of players found, I'll come back to this) to play alone, we quickly understand that it's thought of as a cooperative game, up to 4 players.
Rare phenomenon: a group of 4 players at work
The structure of the game is fixed, which means that, whether you are alone or 4 in the group, you will face the same number of enemies, with the same power. The problem being that we will often - alone - be less powerful than what is recommended in the mission selection. It will therefore be at best very difficult, at worst impossible to progress. Which brings me to one of the big negative points of the game, despite the Playstation/PC cross-play, it is extremely complicated to find players! By launching a quick game (which forms a group on the missions already played), it's about ok, in 1 minute, a group is ready to use. On the other hand, to progress in the scripted missions, you have to be patient... and a stopwatch! Matchmaking tries to find players for 2 minutes. In the absence of players, rather than continue or cancel the mission, he launches it solo, except that most missions after the 2nd chapter are impossible, unless you have a big power gap, so grind for a long time in previous levels. This is total nonsense. We therefore find ourselves, if we are a bit reckless, progressing until we lose our 5 lives, or abandon the mission just launched to return to the small central HUB.
When we play alone in the advanced levels, we often come to this painful moment...
Because yes, like any self-respecting game-service, we have a central area where we can meet a few players and other NPCs. The selection here is quite limited: a stylist to change your appearance whenever you want, a blacksmith (which you unlock in Chapter 3, and who, with a lot of resources, can forge interesting objects), a quest provider, a chest, a musician, quest and ranking boards and a salesperson... who takes us to the paid store for the title! More precisely, it is multi-functional, and you can change the tab to the conch shop that accepts in-game currency... but I find it quite funny to be sent to the Garaz shop (the name of the currency paid) with items starting at €5. Dissociating the two sellers might have been better perceived...
Now let's tackle the part that will make many players wince: its graphics. Yes, Babylon's Fall is far from being a technical war thunderbolt. In gamer memory, most PS3 games fared better than that. The artistic bias is incomprehensible. The intention is commendable at first glance, but it's pixelated as impossible and the studio doesn't even seem to be using anti-aliasing... If only it was in the service of readability, it could have passed , but not even. We'll just have a lot of trouble beating a 4-player boss. Yes, the latest from studio PlatinumGames is ugly, and it's not the few verbose and animated cutscenes in stop-motion that will fix the situation. In return, and because it is still important: the game is displayed in 4K and 60FPS constant. That's already it, being optimistic.
The bosses will often give a hard time!
Side soundtrack, not much to report, it's nice without being memorable. The same goes for dubbing, offered in English and Japanese. I preferred the Japanese version, a bit more convincing than the English performance.
Comes the hour of the conclusion, and in the state, it seems to me difficult to recommend the purchase of Babylon's Fall to anyone. No, the game is not as horrible as I have read here and there. I appreciate its missions and the dynamism of its gameplay. I regret, however, that the matchmaking is faulty, that its graphics are so little detailed, that the content is for the moment quite rickety and that Square Enix opted for a €70 box when the Free-to-Play format seemed the most suitable given the combat past and its store. There is, I'm sure, an audience that could appreciate this title, but it is clearly not in the right segment, and it will have to enrich itself with content quickly to keep the (thin) community of players active. and maybe convert new ones. To be continued, hoping that the roadmap published by the studio will not be the last.
The roadmap for the coming month...
