Hello everyone and welcome back to Kralizec Gaming.Today we are going to take a look at Bad North. This real-time strategy promises to combine tactics and roguelite features in a charming graphical style to create fun strategic gameplay. Whether it can deliver on its promise is the question we will try to answer today. Bad North is available on Steam for 14 Euros and 99 cents or your regional equivalent.

With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Video Review

Text Review

Strategy games – and even more real-time strategy games – aren’t my forte. I’m bad at them and it is very rare that I really enjoy them. And that is why I review them so infrequently. But Bad North’s charming graphics and the fact that it promises a simple strategy made me give it a try.

Gameplay

And as we do always, we will first take a look at the gameplay of Bad North. And honestly, this is much more simple that I would’ve ever expected from a real-time strategy game as you just get a few squads that you just order around to the positions you want them to be in. But as would anyone who knows anything about strategy games tell you, things get quickly very involved.

The first and obvious way to make such a system more involved is to have different types of units and that is exactly what you get here. Three types of units to be specific. Your basic guys with a sword and a shield. Guys with pikes and last but not least – archers. And these work like rock, paper, scissors where archers kill guys with pikes (or guys without shields or armor in general), the guys with a sword and shield destroy archers but they themselves get wrecked by the guys with pikes. Really, it’s that simple of a design.

The second way the developers choose to enhance the complexity of Bad North is by giving you activatable abilities. These are tied into items that you find during your gameplay and range from really simple stuff like a hammer that gives you a giant smash to things that really require you to consider heavily who will use them like a ring that increases the size of the squads. And obviously, there are many more items for you to find and possibly use.

And the last but probably the most influential mechanic are upgrades. These can similarly to the squad types be put into three different categories. The first upgrades the unit themselves. And actually, you need to use it first on the very very basic units to get one of the three types out of them. And you can push their upgrade further making them into better and stronger units.
The second type of upgrades uses the items and just makes them more powerful. Whether it means the abilities they provide deal more damage or get more charges you get the drift. And lastly, we have upgrades that aren’t really upgrades. But they are abilities themselves. For example, the archers get a volley of arrows that decimate their foes. Or the sword and shield guys get an attack that allows them to jump from cliffs for extra damage. And again these can be upgraded multiple times.

And that’s pretty much it for what the game provides you with. From there it’s all about careful strategic decision. When and where to deploy your units. Should I send my squad to recruit new members in the local house or will that mean I will get slaughtered by the incoming waves of enemies? Can I use my ability now or should I save it for the final wave? You know, your standard real-time strategy decision.

But what we haven’t talked about yet is what the game throws at you. Well, we did… to a degree. Your foes will mostly be using the exact same types of units as you are with a few tiny exceptions that I will leave there to surprise you. It’s really mostly about using your units correctly to counter the enemies units and doing it in a way that depletes the least of your resources.

So… how does this all play? Is it fun? Hell yeah. It’s been a really long time since I enjoyed playing a real-time strategy and I’m very glad to say that I have enjoyed my time with Bad North. Add to that the fact that the game uses roguelite mechanics to provide you with near infinite replayability and you got one hell of a great value proposition.

Story

Okay… moving away from the gameplay, let’s talk about the story now. The story – which really isn’t that important in Bad North – puts you into the shoes of a king who is forced to defend his idyllic island kingdom from invading Vikings. And really that is all there is to the story. And the game doesn’t pretend to make you heavily invested in the story and honestly, that’s a good decision for what it is.

Graphics

Next, we have to speak about the graphics. Those are just charming. Very simple, to be honest, nothing that will heavily tax your graphics card but the graphics provided are cute and very easy to orient in. And if there is something that is good to see in a real-time strategy is an easy time to orient yourself.

Music

Thirdly, we have to say a bit about the sounds of Bad North. And by those, I was pleasantly surprised. They aren’t quite at the level where I’d put them into my regular listening music library but I also wasn’t tuning them down at all and was more than happy to listen to them.

Performance

Before we bring this review to a close we have to briefly mention how Bad North performs. And I am happy to report that the game performs flawlessly. I haven’t encountered any bugs nor has the game ever crashed for me. And it’s quite simple graphics mean that the game will run well on even a potato of a computer.

Conclusion

So… in conclusion: Bad North is a fun little real-time strategy that found a spot on the market that laid unfulfilled until it came out. A game that provides a quick burst of strategic fun when you don’t have half an hour (or more) to dedicate to playing a bigger real-strategy. And the devs even realized that they need to add some randomness to this otherwise it would quickly become repetitive and thus they added roguelike mechanics. So if you are a fan of strategy games and want something that will give you that quick burst of strategic fun between doing something else – go and buy Bad North right now.

So, that’s it for today guys. Hope you like the review and if you did, please consider upvoting the review and following my blog. And comment, if you have something you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.

Disclaimer: All the images have been taken directly from the Steam game page