This game has great peaks but I'm left feeling like there wasn't enough. That being said nothing feels better than pulling off defending an island with a group of B-teamers and staying on pace to get to every island
i be on some heroic shi defendin villigers from Vikings an shi
I liked the art and the core mechanics, but it BADLY needed some streamlining. The roguelike elements don't work very well, because the first 2/3rds are SO easy and there's really only one 'ideal' strategy. To mitigate that, they patched in the ability to replay islands indefinitely, so you basically can't lose unless you find yourself so overmatched that you literally can't win.
Interesting ideas, some great design, but would have benefited from ditching the roguelite elements and leaning into a slightly more narrative experience.
Interesting ideas, some great design, but would have benefited from ditching the roguelite elements and leaning into a slightly more narrative experience.
played the demo, fucking loved it. bought the physical edition for 50$, fucking love it. i just beat the game right now, and there was ONE FUCKING UNIT LEFT, STANDING ON A HILL OF BLOOD AND CORPSES, and i dont mean a whole single team, nah the last single commander. now thats a memory to be treasured. moments where im cornered by barbarians enhance that feeling of pure and visceral war. this game is so good oh my god (buy it for 15$ tho its not worth 50$)
I thought that revisiting Bad North a year later would make me like the game more, but my opinion barely changed. I still think that the game is wonderful when it comes to extreme condensation of RTS-trappings into a roguelike formula, and for what it's worth, the bones of a great roguelike are very much present here. Calculating how many commanders to send on which islands to get which results is very fun, in the same way that a simple puzzle game or a quick math quiz can be fun, with the added bonus of a great visual style and servicably crunchy sound-design.
However, the game is also still extremely unbalanced. I mentioned in my first review how basically 80% of a regular playthrough will either be a cake-walk or impossible to have any fun with, and I still think that, basically, Bad North has 2 general states: easy beyond belief and hard beyond reason. For the "Hard" difficulty, the ratio is somewhat scewed towards the latter, but the amount of times a player enters a true flow-state with Bad North's gameplay loop is still abysmally low. I wish that more thought was given to enemy types and how items work, because the game we got is more akin to rock-paper-scissors with some nice micro and item cooldown-managment.
This game is, like many roguelikes, pretty damn addictive, so I might return to it just for the hardest difficulty, but at this point I feel like I have well and truly reached the limits of the complexity and challenge Bad North has to offer
However, the game is also still extremely unbalanced. I mentioned in my first review how basically 80% of a regular playthrough will either be a cake-walk or impossible to have any fun with, and I still think that, basically, Bad North has 2 general states: easy beyond belief and hard beyond reason. For the "Hard" difficulty, the ratio is somewhat scewed towards the latter, but the amount of times a player enters a true flow-state with Bad North's gameplay loop is still abysmally low. I wish that more thought was given to enemy types and how items work, because the game we got is more akin to rock-paper-scissors with some nice micro and item cooldown-managment.
This game is, like many roguelikes, pretty damn addictive, so I might return to it just for the hardest difficulty, but at this point I feel like I have well and truly reached the limits of the complexity and challenge Bad North has to offer
Cool artstyle, fun gameplay, interesting decisions with reasonable risk in-between levels.
It's got a lot of visual and audio polish that is really good. It's a real easy to sit down and play for a bit, however the gameplay loop just isn't engaging enough to really warrant a lot of playtime.
simples e bonitinho, demora um pouco pra engatar
Bad North was super fun and addictive when I was still figuring it out and trying to get as far as possible, but after a while you start to notice that 80% of your playthrough is either piss-easy or literally impossible to have fun or win. That 20% is super enjoyable and shows how this game can be great at simplifying the RTS genre into something everyone can have a blast with, but it's spread very thin over your playthrough. I really wanted to love this, but the balancing and the shallow tactics let this one down A LOT