Babylon’s Fall feels steps away from greatness – Review

gamepur.com:

Ever since bursting onto the scene with the instant classic that was Bayonetta, Platinum Games has had its share of peaks and valleys. For every well rounded package like Nier: Automata, there’s a lopsided project like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Manhattan. Babylon’s Fall leans toward the latter, feeling like the studio’s biggest missed opportunity to date.

Looking back at Platinum Games’ magnum opus within the action genre, Bayonetta’s opening cinematic was polished for the time, exuding a level of confidence that translated from cutscene to gameplay. Its style shone through, communicated by equal parts stylized choreography and competent rendering for its era.

Babylon’s Fall has none of this sheen to carry players through its opening moments, or the rest of the adventure for that matter. It employs a brushwork style that attempts to simulate the look of a painting in motion, but there’s much to be desired from its execution.

Stylized visuals can look stunning when they’re integrated properly into a game’s vision. Every aspect of its final output, from its polygon budget to its effects work to its overall art design, must be carefully balanced to achieve an attractive look.

Unfortunately, Platinum Games’ implementation inhibits the entire visual presentation to the point that even serious cinematics are difficult to take seriously. Closeups and mid-distance shots of character models look worse than anything from Bayonetta, a nearly 13-year-old game made two console generations ago. Environments hardly fare better, lacking any sort of presence as everything blends together into a mushy soup of simplistic geometry and low resolution textures. That’s to say nothing of awkward effects such