Game Review: Bad North

There aren’t a lot of modern real time strategy games around, and I don’t see many new ones coming out often. That’s fine, because it makes it simple to pick out a few standouts a couple times a year; Bad North is one such standout.

Deceptively Simple

Its gameplay appears extremely easy at first glance, you control about 1-4 units of soldiers, which come in 3 major archetypes, but can never tell them how to fight, directly. Instead, you give orders to unit commanders on where they should hold their ground, retreat to, or provide support for other forces on your team. The three classes present include archers, pikemen, and shielded foot-soldiers, which are used in combination with each other in a rock-paper-scissors-like fashion to defend islands.

Islands have houses that must be protected from viking invaders, ranging from crazed axe-throwing berserkers, to hulking giants that will blow holes in your defenses and turn even the best close-range fighters into ragdolls. The northerners will come at islands from every possible direction, and will sometimes heavily load a single side of an island so that the opposite end is left vulnerable to flanking. You can never know exactly how any island you land on will be attacked, but analyzing terrain, choke-points, and potential match-ups will help you increase the odds of successful defense.

For each house that survives a raid, you are awarded gold depending on the house’s size. This gold can be spent on upgrades for your units, which range from more damage and defense, or special abilities like arrow barrages, spear-rushes, and plunging attacks from above. Chances are you won’t be able to max out upgrades on every unit under your wing, so upgrades must be purchased carefully based on your needs during a given play-through.

Islands are procedurally generated, which might turn off some hardcore “I only want hand-made stuff” people, but for those of you who enjoy re-runs and trying out varying playstyles, Bad North won’t disappoint. Islands have a huge range of terrain-variance and housing locations, which make every encounter interesting, especially when you take into account the wide range of enemy types, which can be synergistically more dangerous when the worst-case scenario combinations start to come into play in the late game. Some units stand no chance against certain enemy types; pikemen, for instance, cannot block arrows, which means any time archers start showing up en-mass on larger boats, you’ll either need to send in some shield units, or be prepared to out-snipe them with some archers of your own. The goal is to minimize losses, should you want to succeed.

Clawing for Life

Like a king in chess, commanders will be the last unit in a group to fall. If a commander dies, there is no way to bring them back, so your job is to make sure that when their group starts becoming too thin, you send them inland to regenerate at a house that hasn’t been burned down. The healing process is time consuming, so you have to make the tough decisions when you don’t have many men across the board, and defense is a priority. If you let a group fully recover, its general will get a fresh set of men to command, which often can turn the tides when you get into a close game. That said, sometimes you’ll find yourself losing half the commanders you send into an island (which is extremely costly to your future success), and it might be a better choice to fully abandon an island by retreating your men to the boats viking invaders leave on the shoreline after arrival to keep commanders alive.

Terrain plays a key role in how you tackle island defense. High ground provides accuracy bonuses to archers, and pikemen holding choke-points, such as hill slopes or narrow crevices, can keep their distance more efficiently, allowing them to take out much larger groups of foot soldiers than they normally would. Positioning your units to maximize damage output while mixing in risky moves that you believe will pay off is the only way to make it through the end game. Chances are you will lose some good men, but careful planning and efficient commands will minimize losses.

Bad North is a fun balancing act that takes the rock-paper-scissor approach to the next level. You might think you have everything under control going into an island, only to have that very mission go terribly wrong, making the only logical solution pulling out and taking a loss. The real skill is in knowing your unit’s strengths and weaknesses, and avoiding the islands that, despite extremely high potential payoff, may slaughter everybody you like. The more units you keep alive, the more you have at your disposal for the future.

The Bigger Picture

Between battles, you will be met with a map of the islands you can choose to land on. Chances are you will not save them all, so you have to pick based on risk vs. reward. Each turn that goes by, the viking horde (essentially a “world’s-end” wave that pushes players forward, or swallows overly-conservative players) will overtake the farthest undefended islands (sometimes an upwards of 3+ islands). At the start of each turn, you can see which islands have been lost and the ones you can defend. You can take multiple islands per turn, but you only have X number of commanders at your disposal, so the more islands you greedily tack on per turn, the more you spread your forces thin, vastly decreasing survival chance. Ultimately, it’s this meta-game that matters most, as playing things too safe will prevent you from having the money you need to fully upgrade your favorite units, but playing too aggressively will kill your commanders outright, leaving you with scraps that don’t stand a chance on their own.

This might sound overwhelming to someone hearing about Bad North for the first time, but thanks to developer updates over the last few months, casual players can also call the game home; the introduction of checkpoint isles allows you to roll back a run to a significant point if you end up losing all your commanders, and many niche details in the upgrade system have been reworked and expanded to allow new players more options. You can choose to start new runs with commanders that have hand-selected traits, mitigating some of the randomness the original updates if that’s your cup of tea, or you can play the game with random units (or bare ones) if you’d like. They’ve even added in a “codex” of all the game’s intricacies, so if you’re ever unsure of how a certain enemy type should be fought, or how to use different abilities, the answer can be found from the main menu after you see a new unit or unlock a special move for the first time. There have been a few quality of life changes as well, and at this point, the game feels truly feature-complete; anything extra would be bonus, a kind gesture from the devs.

Verdict:

Story: [N / A] - It’s an arcade-style roguelike; there’s not really any story or lore, other than the simple “see how far you can go” while getting paid to protect defenseless islanders everywhere you land.

Gameplay: [79 / 100] - Lots of replay value is present here; if you are someone who likes to listen to audiobooks while you keep your hands busy, this may be a perfect title for that. The gameplay loop respects your time after updates have fine-tuned its mechanics, and retains its fun after multiple run-throughs. The depth offered in terms of your tactical options, however, is pretty shallow, and you’ll quickly learn the best ways to win most levels.

Presentation: [81/ 100] - A clever mix of billboarded sprites and 3D models creates a unique style I wish more people tried; it looks really clean and professional for something made by a three man development team.

The sound design is satisfying, menus are minimalist and snappy, and every mechanic has been visibly refined to the point where I can’t see any weak links. The way Bad North’s gameplay and art come together creates a unique experience that comes off as highly polished and worth the entry fee.

Score: 80 / 100

As it stands, Bad North excels at creating a fun unique experience through refined mechanics that force players to take risks and go with the flow. If you are hungry for a strategy game, but don’t want to fully commit to something in the vein of Sid Meier’s depth or Starcraft’s twitch-speed precision, Bad North will sit perfectly in your collection and provide you with enough content for hours of fun.