Babel Rising

The gameplay of Babel Rising mixes action and management of resources: the divine powers. The player has an array of powers that they may send at a chosen location, the only limitation being the recharging time for each power. The more the powers recharge, the more powerful they become; this generates tactical choices and forces players to take risks for maximum earnings.

If at first, it seems easy to destroy all the workers as they come closer, as the player progresses in the game, choosing the right moment to send each power becomes increasingly difficult. Sooner or later, the player will quite often be overwhelmed and the tower will rise slowly to game over.

The game is a fanciful adaptation of a biblical context. At the time of the construction of the city of Babylon, the humans erect a tower meant to reach the skies and they show such arrogance as to supposedly irritate God-the player.

The action takes place in an imaginary Babylon and uses various monuments and places associated to this civilization. The game does not take itself seriously and, as such, disregards historical facts. Workers can thus build the Tower of Babel, the Ishtar Gate, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but also more fanciful buildings such as a giant statue.

Babel Rising was originally a co-production of White Birds Productions studio and Exequo. White Birds Productions ceased to exist in December 2010 and Exequo carried through with the development of the game and of its sequels, in partnership with Mando Productions, who was in charge of creating and producing all the new versions of the game.

The initial version of Babel Rising iPhone was developed using tools internal to the development team at White Birds, some of which were specifically designed for the game itself. The ensuing versions were progressively centralized in a unique middleware, Shiva, developed by the firm Stonetrip. All developments were carried out by internal teams at Mando Productions and a few collaborators from the outside, using Shiva as the main engine.

The iOS, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions received "mixed" reviews, while the PC version received "unfavorable" reviews, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. It was criticized on several counts. The main reproach was the repetitive aspect of the game, but criticism also pointed at technical inaccuracies in the console version of Babel Rising 3D (Kinect and PS Move).

In July 2012, the Babel Rising license reached 2.5 million downloads, for all the versions of the game. In the following month, in the space of two weeks, Babel Rising 3D reaped an additional million downloads, thanks to the game's transition to Free-to-play on Google Play, bringing the total to over 3.5 million downloads.