Black Beacon May Well Be The Next Big Name In The Gacha Space

Black Beacon has just landed on mobile devices, but it found us a little sooner than most! We’ve been fortunate enough to get hands-on with the Mythic Sci-Fi Action RPG, and we’re eager to let you know what we think about it.

Black Beacon is an action RPG with an emphasis on fast, buttery-smooth combat that integrates character-swapping into the mix.

Shh! This Is A Library! 

The game kicks off in the Library Of Babel, a massive and mysterious structure which takes inspiration from both the biblical Tower Of Babel, supposedly built by men to reach heaven, and the Jorge Luis Borges short story, where it is a library that contains every possible combination of letters, and therefore every book ever written is hidden somewhere inside. 

You awaken at this strange structure, with little idea of how you got there, and a bunch of colorful characters you’re sure to collect in future questioning the same thing. It appears you’ve got some great destiny before you. 

Also, everyone’s going to get killed by a giant spinning orb in twenty-four hours. Welcome to your first day on the job, Seer! Hope you like bookshelves.

Joking aside, there is something charmingly wild about the setting and story. A library full of gibberish books, time travel, lots of mythology references we won’t spoil too much for you (but we’re sure there’s something weird about that bird). It throws you into the deep end story-wise, and that works fine. If you’re confused, good. We’re pretty sure that’s exactly what they’re going for. 

So what about the gameplay?

Send Me In, Coach

Black Beacon’s moment-to-moment experience is kind of an ARPG dungeon crawler, with a customizable camera viewpoint. You can play it top-down, or a free camera setup where you use your other hand to adjust the view. We liked the second, but it’s mostly personal preference.

You advance through the passageways of the Library, towards your goals. The story is broken into short, episodic sections, which have a few maps in each. Accessing a section involves expending some energy-mechanics, though from our experience, the game was fairly generous in how much it allowed us to play.

You explore the area, complete puzzles, hunt for hidden treasure chests, and fight enemies, these warped-looking entities that are, apparently, remnants of people that the Library ‘has not fully digested’. Yikes.

Combat is pretty enjoyable. It’s fast and quite button-mashy, but keeps things challenging enough to not feel like brain-dead busywork. Timing is important. Hitting a perfect dodge gives you a period of iframes afterward, while landing a heavy attack on an enemy preparing for their own will interrupt it and save you the trouble of dodging.

The game also has a character-swap mechanic that enables and encourages you to swap characters mid-fight. This makes battles a bit of a tag team match, as you can immediately bench exhausted fighters, even mid-attack, to drop a fresh one in. Once you’ve got the rhythm down, you feel pretty good about it… Well, until you mistime a dodge and some giant monster yeets you thirty feet down the hallway.

Characters And Weapon Rolls

Now it’s a gacha game so no doubt, enjoyers of the genre will be asking about how that works out. It’s a character and weapon gacha, with weapons matching specific characters. You can level both of these. The number of different ingredients used between these is considerable, but you can automate a lot of the messing about.

You’re likely to run into some characters through the gacha before you encounter them in-game. But something something, the flow of time is convoluted. It serves the purpose of giving some more variety.

So what’s our take on this overall? Black Beacon is a quirky gacha game that seems eager to tell a more esoteric story, and its gameplay is solid enough to support that. We’re interested to see how things go once the release drops.

Sound right up your street? Or a row of shelves in the giant library you live in? Then you might want to check out Black Beacon right now, via the official website, App Store, or Google Play.