"Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos is one of just a few action roguelike titles that not only stands toe to toe with Vampire Survivors, but finds ways to improve upon its award winning formula."
As someone who has played and reviewed around two dozen action roguelikes over the past few years, I have seen more than my fair share of games that fall into one of the two following categories.
Titles which barely innovate on the Vampire Survivors formula.
Titles which try to be too inventive and create something that is far less fun to play than Vampire Survivors.
While this is not the only two categories titles fall into, there are also plenty of titles that either are fun to play but are wildly overpriced, or they look great, are fairly priced, and are fun to play, but contain almost no content and or meta progression.
There are also some other groups of varying size due to the dynamic nature of gaming, but listing them all would take too long.
Instead we will look at the rarest group of them all, a group comprised of titles that not only improve upon the formula or add their own unique spin, but do so in such a way that it results in a title that is actually in some ways better than its inspiration, and is more than able to stand alongside it as an equally good game, even if it has little to no chance of surpassing it in popularity or sales.
As I touched on earlier, adding new mechanics to an established formula is very risky, as making too many changes to a proven formula can make it less enjoyable, while making too few can result in a product that feels like a worse version of a better game.
Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos however manages to not only introduce a sizable amount of new mechanics (many borrowed from the ARPG genre), but incorporate them in such a way that Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos would appeal to fans of action RPGs and action roguelikes alike, doubling its potential demographic, while also making itself unique enough to warrant a purchase by players who may already own some of the best games that both genres have to offer.
Very often when you play a game like Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos, created by a small studio such as NANOO, you will see a wide array of mismatched art assets, mostly comprised of Fiverr commissions, asset stores, and the occasional in-house artist. However that is not the case with Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos, in which every single asset from flooring to character sprites looks like it belongs together.
While I cannot say if the assets are entirely unique or some combination of asset packs and custom commissions, they clearly have been created by the same artist or art team, which has resulted in a vastly superior final product.
When combined with Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos’s exceptionally good performance on a wide range of hardware, this makes me confident that if ported to enough platforms (including 8th generation consoles), it has the potential to do very well indeed, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the very best games that the action roguelike genre has to offer.
Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos’s moment to moment gameplay and progression are pretty much perfect.
While there are minor issues with both, I feel the rest of the game, and the overwhelming quality of gameplay and progression, more than make up for any minor inconveniences caused by the lack of dodging (gameplay) or the large amount of grind required to max out all progression options. However that is very much optional, and maxing out each and every option is in no way needed to complete the game.
Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos is an action rogue-like game developed and published by NANOO, it released on 19 May 2025, and is available exclusively on PC.
Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos supports:
Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos supports the following peripherals:
Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos is unrated and contains:
I am really impressed with Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos.
While it is rather grindy at times due to the depth of its meta progression mechanics, it is very fun to play, looks fantastic, and like with all games there is no law saying you have to grind all the way to 100 percent completion right away, or even at all.
Ultimately a fantastic game, and one I cannot wait to see arrive on console, where I feel it will do even better than it did on PC.
We found Tower of Babel: Survivors of Chaos to be a masterpiece of a game, meaning it is a must-play for almost every gamer, due to its near-perfect gameplay experience.
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"While Gunbot Diplomacy is a great-looking game, it feels like such a direct copy of Brotato that it makes me want to play that instead."
"While "Yet Another Zombie Survivors" is a lot of fun, the developer's insistence on re-using assets from previous games and utilizing 3D visuals hit it hard in the performance department, making the mid to late game unenjoyable across a wide variety of PC configurations."
