Babel Rising is another interesting use of the Kinect. An adaptation of a mobile touchscreen game, the player’s objective is to stop the people on the screen from building a tall tower, taking on the role of God. The player must learn a series of gestures to use in front of the Kinect camera, which allows the camera to navigate around the three-dimensional tower as well as providing the godly powers. The various gestures will do things like strike lightning, cast fireballs, generate tsunamis, etc. More builders are always arriving on site to help build, and you must make sure that they all die terribly in a series of elemental attacks.
The Icrontic Spotlight this week illuminates the depths of Krater, a dungeon crawler, set in a post-apocalyptic world. Denizens of this dystopia have discovered a gigantic shaft which descends into the earth deeper than anyone has yet explored. The deeper one goes, the more valuable the artifacts that can be found, but more dangerous enemies come with them. The single player campaign has players choosing three part-members from four classes, which are then commanded simultaneously, and developed RPG style. The development progress made in the single-player campaign carries over into the cooperative multi-player modes.
Mostly it looks like a typical RPG, but one unique element of the character progression which stands out is the ‘injury’ system, which introduces the sense of danger that comes from permanent character death but without quite as high a risk factor. Every time a character loses all of their HP, they are knocked down. If a character gets knocked down four times before they can find a doctor (and enough money), they take an ‘Injury’ which permanently decrements the character’s statistics in some way. Each character can only survive three such injuries. If it’s time to get a fourth, the character dies with no recovery. This is a neat compromise between the modes seen in other games, in which the character is either immortal with few repercussions—if any—for failure, or dies permanently on the first unlucky misstep into a too-hard monster’s den.
The visual style is also worth noting. Typically, when you hear ‘post-apocalyptic’ setting for a video game, you picture vast deserts, and lonely sun-bleached shacks. Krater is a world in which the dystopia is an overgrown wilderness. The surface world is dark and green and does not lack for people and structures. It’s ruinous, surely, but not barren.
There isn’t much info yet about how the co-op mode works: how items and gold will be shared, how players will team up and interact. These are important considerations, and unfortunately, the developers seem mostly concerned with the single-player experience, which could be a bad sign for lovers of co-op if it ends up having been tacked on as an afterthought. Guess we’ll have to play it and see.
Following is a full list of North American releases:
Windows
- Krater
- Runes of Magic Chapter V: Fires of Shadowforge
- Splice
Wii
- The Last Blade (VC)
DS
- iCarly: Groovy Foodie!
- Devil Band: Rock the Underworld
3DS
- Mad Dog McCree
Xbox 360
- Babel Rising
- Lollipop Chainsaw
- Phantom Breaker
PS3
- Lollipop Chainsaw
PSP
- Gungnir
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