As of the release of this review, this game is currently in Alpha on Early Access Steam.
I must admit I was never into the bullet-hell survival genre. Not to say it shouldn’t exist or anything like that, but it just wasn’t for me. Now, when I saw Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos, the thing that intrigued me was the art. It reminded me of the dark fantasy art style of Darkest Dungeon. I decided to give it a chance off of that alone, oddly enough, and I’m glad I did.
Art and Presentation
The visual design is what initially drew me in, and it doesn’t disappoint. The hand-drawn dark fantasy aesthetic genuinely captures that Darkest Dungeon feel, and the creature designs are particularly well done. Each floor introduces newer bloodthirsty monstrosities chasing you down, and they’re all visually distinct and engaging.
Core Gameplay
The core gameplay of bullet-hell survivals is to survive an onslaught of enemies or projectiles trying to rip you into shreds within a time limit. As you destroy the wave of enemies, they drop small diamonds (I’m guessing) that you collect to gain experience during the battle. When you level up during the battle, you get a chance to choose one of three blessings that are randomized. They can increase your basic attacks, specials, give you an elemental skill, and so on. Once the battle is over though, you do not keep these and can either do the floor again or move to the next one.
Progression and Equipment System
What can give you an edge after every battle are the character upgrades and armor you find throughout the tower floors. Roguelike games always have you starting over each battle, but in this, your character can be upgraded with their basic attributes. Or, here is the kicker, you can upgrade the random blessings you get to have the chance of having multiple level upgrades during the fight. It is a game of chance since those three blessings are always random. You do have the ability to reroll your three or remove a blessing from showing again during that fight, but you are limited in those choices.
I’m not sure if this has been done in others, but I love the armor system. It is basically the loot system from Diablo where you pick up sets of equipment, and the gear can give you random abilities such as increasing the critical hits of your ice blessings, evading enemies, or making you attack faster. This can make it so you plan on which blessings you want to prioritize over others.
Character Variety and Story
I do like this setup, though I wish there was some variety between the characters. You can play as a warrior, wizard, and brawler currently. It looks like in future updates there will be more, but as of now those are your three. I thought they would have different magic blessings, but they are all the same. The only difference is the basic and special attack. I was hoping each character would have their own types of blessings, but I wouldn’t say this ruined the game for me.
Games of this genre normally don’t have a story it seems, but this one has one, sort of. Each character has their reasons for being in the area and wanting to go into the tower, but we hardly see why or any real dialogue. You get some at the start and a line or two after beating a boss level. That is it though, and I think there is some potential wasted here. They don’t have to have the characters outright say anything, but they could easily have hidden lore possibly in the items you find throughout your battles, or even a lore book with each monster you face.
Technical Performance
Last, I wanted to talk about playing it between PC and the Steam Deck. On PC it worked fine on keyboard, but I was having a lot of issues with the controller. It would freeze my character, and even if I tried to switch back to keyboard, it still wouldn’t work sometimes, so I would have to reboot the game. It worked flawlessly for me on the Steam Deck though. It was nice just sitting on my chair downstairs playing it on there.
Final Thoughts
As I said at the beginning of this, I was pleasantly surprised I enjoyed this. The grind of these games still isn’t what I consider my favorite though. Even though each floor has some differences, overall you’re grinding your way over and over again, and some enjoy that. If you are a fan of the genre, I would give anyone a thumbs up on Tower of Babel.
