Developer: Plausible Concept
Publisher: Raw Fury
RRP: £11.99 (Gog.com. Humblebundle and Steam)
Released: 16th November 2018
Available on: Gog.com. Humblebundle and Steam
Played Using: Mouse
Approximate game length: 10 Hours
Are you suffering from unwanted Viking hordes assaulting your home? Then you need Viking-B-Gone! Made from the strongest steel available this product is guaranteed to persuade you’re unwanted guests that you aren’t to be raided! Buy now and this product will come with an entire unit ready to protect your home from all manner of Viking threats. Warning: Not 100% effective against brutes.
Bad North is a Real Time Strategy Roguelite (RTSR?). ‘How can that work?’ You may ask. Well the Roguelite aspect appears in a couple of ways, for starters every island you defend from the invading Vikings is procedurally generated as are their positions on the map. Some of these islands will give a special item or new commander upon a successful defense. It’s the skills that some of these commanders have that passes on from playthrough to playthrough as you can choose to have one of those skills applied to your starting commanders.
So, as I’ve mentioned a few times, Vikings are what you are defending the island from and they come in a variety of flavours. At the start its a fairly easy unit with no real defense and is pretty weak overall. However it doesn’t take long before you start contending with brutes that can knock your men into the sea (which kills them), axe throwing shield men and berserkers. Thankfully you don’t have to defend the islands with a ragtag group of soldiers. You can assign what kind of unit your starting units, and any others you acquire along the way, are going to be. Admittedly the choices seem rather… limited, being that there are only three types to pick from; archers, swordsmen and pikemen. The good thing there is that each unit can be upgraded three times, each upgrade making them stronger. You can also give that units commander an item which itself can also be upgraded and then the unit can learn a skill that can really change the course of a battle. The problem is all this cost money…
Money is earned by saving as many houses upon an island as possible. You fail at defending the island if all the houses are burned down or all your units are killed. As your unit fights they will inevitably get injured, in that event you can choose to heal them in one of the houses you’re protecting. However it’ll take a while and while they’re gone the Viking hordes will continue their assault.
This game is a strategy game of what of most other strategy games would refer to as a skirmish. You only control a maximum of four units and have to fight off much larger hordes using the terrain and tactical positioning to your advantage. When you select a unit to move time slows down allowing you some breathing room. However it must be said that in later portions of the game its really really easy to misclick due to a level of panic appearing from seeing so many enemies literally apparate from the fog.
I played this game twice, once on normal and then on easy. In normal mode this game is really really challenging, it forced me to make decisions about what buildings I may have to sacrifice. On easy… I still thought about what buildings or commanders I may lose but knew that slight less enemies would appear. That’s about the only difference between the two modes I could find, and I don’t even want to consider what hard mode is like.
Is the game good though? Well since my only real gripe with the game is that I was so engrossed with it that I had to play it through three times in order to get the screenshots. I have to say yes.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
FTL
Crying Suns
Dead Cells
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