Babylon’s Fall has been an enigma from the beginning. Players weren’t impressed during the first closed beta in 2021, commenting on the game’s blurry and pixelated visuals. While the development team seemed to take those complaints to heart, maybe the damage was already done. Despite going gold in early January, PC gamers didn’t show up on the game’s release day yesterday. On Steam, the title peaked at under 650 concurrent players. That made it the 4,894 biggest game on the video game service for March 3.
For perspective, Marvel’s Avengers, another Square Enix live game, saw 28,000 players at launch and was marked as a failure by the higher-ups.
Upon scrolling through the game’s reviews on Steam, users will be hard-pressed to find much positive feedback. With 71 reviews at the time of writing, Babylon’s Fall is marked as Mixed.
“Free-to-play game for €60. Stay away,” says a top comment by user musmusculus.
While many comments mention the game’s strange visuals, the biggest point of contention seems to be the microtransactions.
“This fully priced AAA title contains enough microtransactions to make a gacha game blush, though at the very least it all seems to be cosmetic, early game help or time savers – nothing quite pay to win,” says Steam user uggron. “It has a battle pass 100 tiers deep, with both a free and a paid track. “You can, naturally, simply pay your way, with real money, to the final tier. This would cost you well over $100 if you did it from the first tier.
[Babylon’s Fall] is a potentially fun PlatinumGames title was stretched into a massive time and money sink that is really hard to justify. It’s Square Enix’s Avengers game all over again.”
Babylon’s Fall was released yesterday, March 3, for PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. Players who purchased the game’s Digital Deluxe version were able to access the full game on February 28, 2022. In better news, PlatinumGames is also hard at work on Bayonetta 3, which is expected to be released on the Nintendo Switch sometime this year.
