Babylon's Fall Review

ign.com:

It is difficult for a game to be truly uninteresting. It requires an unlikely convergence of events to perfectly thread the needle between good and terrible to create something remarkably unremarkable; functional and largely inoffensive, but also joyless and flat. Babylon’s Fall is one such convergence: The generic dark fantasy storyline is pointless, and the worst-in-class textures and character models suck any visual appeal out of what could have been an interesting painted-canvas art style. Combat and level design are both competent but plain in single-player or co-op, with just enough good ideas sprinkled in to keep things from immediately growing stale… though it inevitably does. So no, it didn’t exactly keep me glued to my seat for its 15-hour campaign, and no, I don’t think I’ll stick around for much of the endgame.

The world of Babylon’s Fall could have been constructed via Mad Libs. You are a mighty [noun], protecting [place] from the forces of [evil thing] with your trusty [weapon]. Platinum Games’ answer to these prompts are Sentinel, Babylon, the Gallus, and Gideon Coffin, respectively – there’s nothing remotely memorable about any of those things except the last, which is a weird device fused to your spine that projects a pair of ghost arms that let you wield a total of four weapons at once.

The story is largely told in exposition-heavy still images, zooming from one fibrous picture frame to another. The painterly art direction had potential to be interesting, but it never gets the chance because Babylon’s Fall is one of the worst-looking games of the last several console generations. Everything is covered in textures that genuinely would’ve been unimpressive on the PS3. Lighting is almost non-existent, and