Tower of Babel – no mercy Review

If only real-life construction was this easy.

You’d see skyscrapers flying up taller than the Empire State Building in a shorter amount of time than it would take you to rustle together a jam sandwich. The entire thing could come crashing down like a sack of spuds at a moment’s notice given the haphazard way each part of the building is just lobbed on the top, and nothing being bolted together, but I’m sure that the world’s construction companies could find some use for the Tower of Babel method.

A point to note is that this game bears no relation with the previous Tower of Babel game released on the Switch eShop, that came being about tower climbing. Weirdly, neither game is about languages, so perhaps both should have been named after a less linguistically-inspired tower. This game is in fact more akin to Tricky Towers, which had players stacking Tetris-like blocks as high as they could.

Tower of Babel – no mercy has players timing the release of sections of a skyscraper from a swinging pendulum so as to land perfectly on the previous build. Landing the sections perfectly central will result in a points bonus, with the tally going up with each passing section and again with each successive checkpoint.

There are a small range of different gameplay options, but all feel similar. The ‘Selfish’ mode is about straight-forward tower building – with up to four players, it’s about one tower and one winner. The second mode is the Co-op mode, which of course has multiple players sharing responsibility of building the tower, but factors in the elements – a gust of wind can come along to wobble your tower and affect the drop trajectory of the next section once it’s released. The highlight of this mode, however, is that it tracks the height of your tower and records this in a local leaderboard at the end. The last local play mode is the Battle mode, which has two teams working on two separate towers. When one tower starts to pick up pace and leave the other in its dust, or when one player makes a mistake and topples their tower, the battle is decided.

Knocking a tower slightly off-kilter will result in it wobbling for at least the next few pieces, so you’ll always need to be conscious of levelling the thing back off again. But if you lay some down off-centre towards the start, as the screen raises up and beyond that section, the mistake feels like it becomes less of an issue. As such, you only ever feel like you have to worry about the last three sections, rather than the tower as a whole.

Tower of Babel – no mercy’s final gameplay offering is its online mode, but at this early stage following the game’s release and with a minimal player base, finding an online match has proved to be like a needle in a haystack during the course of this review. That’s a shame – but the main online functionality I had hoped for would be for a worldwide leaderboard of the tallest-constructed towers. That was what made Nicky – The Home Alone Golf Ball a moreish title last month, and this type of game is perfect for the same thing. You have to hope that the online kicks into gear, but til then, Tower of Babel is a very samey experience, with very little variation between all of its modes.