Tower of Babel
| Developer: N/A | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Rainbird | Sound: |
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| Year: 1990 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Puzzle | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
7/10 | |
The story is about biblical mythology and aliens, though I didn’t quite catch all of it. You’re supposed to control, in turn, three robotic spiders in 3D worlds to complete various missions. Most of the time, they involve picking up or destroying certain objects. The controls are relatively simple and require no dexterity. Don’t expect wild action; the slow, step-by-step movement feels more like a board game. However, there’s plenty of potential for a good puzzle, for those with a bit of patience (and a coffee machine).
Here are a few tips to get through the early levels:
- First, before shooting at something, make sure it’s not one of your own machines! Since you only control one at a time (from a first-person view), the other two remain visible, waiting patiently for your orders.
- Each of your robots has a special ability: “Zapper” disintegrates things with its laser cannon, “Pusher” shoots a beam that pushes certain objects, and “Grabber”, the intellectual of the bunch, pulls objects towards it and activates complex mechanisms.
- The grey squares are elevators. Walk over them and click on the down arrow.
You won’t need it right away, but the bottom right of the screen is for programming the little robots to perform a series of tasks simultaneously. It’s both clever and easy to use—well done!
In conclusion, I find the game enjoyable, intelligent, and relatively varied. They even thought to include a level editor for the more dedicated players, as well as a tutorial (unnecessary). My only criticism is the sluggish pace (would it have been more dynamic in 2D?), and the levels are restricted to spaces of eight squares by four in height.
Technical considerations: on emulator, Tower of Babel froze right after finishing the first level. I managed to bypass the issue by emulating an Amiga 1000 with a Kickstart 1.3, in .adf format (a virtual floppy disk that loads like a game at startup, then you eject and replace it with the game’s floppy). Also, the “load state” function seems to crash everything. So, save using the original option, after unprotecting your save disk (you’re welcome!).
A recent game made me think a lot of Tower of Babel, it’s Path of Giants (2020).
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