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