Developer: TreeFortress Games
Publisher: TreeFortress Games
Rrp: £3.99
Released: 1st April 2014
Available on Steam and the amazon store
Brad is a barbarian, but he’s also grown weary of fighting to protect his village. On this day he decides on a change of pace and uses the axe-lute (or lute-axe) he created to defend the village.
That’s where you come in, you control Brad and using his axe-lute, summon units to do the fighting for you and also provide beneficial spells. You’ll also be controlling where those units go, because they follow where Brad goes. So you’ll be dodging shots while trying to line up your own troops.
The enemies come at you in waves that you must defeat. Which is easy enough… At first. The difficulty really ramps up once your past the fourth wave. Thankfully each enemy you kill drops gold that you can use to upgrade Brad, the Units or the Town. Also as you progress further you unlock new units. There are also some units that can only be obtained by playing through the additional game modes.
Bardbarian has a simple, cartoonish art style and it works well. Each of the models and backgrounds have been hand drawn and show a lot of personality and humour. This works very well considering the overall light tone of the game.
It’s hard to peg this game to any one genre. Yes it’s a tower defence game, except the towers follow you. Yes it’s a shoot em up, except you don’t control the shooting. It’s a lane defence game, except you don’t stick to the lanes. Normally if you throw that many genre mixes together it ends up being a mess, but this works.
Oh, I recommend using a control pad for this. While WASD does work the experience is just much easier with a control pad.
Originally Bardbarian was a IOS game, now usually that would mean it would be littered with micro-transactions but thankfully I can say this game is completely devoid of them.
On the whole, this game is a fun, if somewhat short lived, aside. I think the Rrp is about right for this title. It’s short and sweet and if you have friends that play it you can attempt to beat their scores.
