REVIEW : Bad North: Jotunn Edition (PC)
Bad North: Jotunn Edition is a minimalist real-time tricky roguelike full of a rigid ancient battle. You command a troops as they jump from island to island, expecting to make a last stand at some period to fend off an awful Viking threat. Although there are moments where the play can feel out of your power, Bad North‘s blend of entwined systems and eerie atmosphere make it hard to put down.
Do not be fooled by the cute sound effects or adorable sprites: Bad North is not a delightful new friend. It’s here to take your time, beat you up and probably burn your home down.
It’s a pure tactics game, substantially more like to be a puzzler. You have to watch a little square island, or more precisely, the little homes dotted around it. You hold up to four sections to hold off swarms of Viking enemies. Bad North is about rearranging units completely to make sure someone is on the shore ready to receive threatening opponents. Difficulties arise with more common waves and multiple enemy types requiring several units to counter.
The true solution to each action is tantalising out the choke points on the bars—putting your troops where they can create the most significant difference without spending time moving them from one point of the island to the another.
It lures you in with some happy opening missions. Slow swirls of opponents, easy odds, basic lands with clear layouts. Soon, a charge that looks the same as the last several ought just one extra wave, one new type of foe, just a little extra something to get you off-guard. You understand your journey has been crushed because of one bad choice, sending you back to begin the campaign all over.
The most immediate way to represent Bad North is to say it’s like FTL, but with Vikings. The play starts putting you in command of two units of troops whose home is invaded by a Viking horde. For the rest of the game, you’re required to make a decisive retreat, collecting resources and extra forces as you go so that conceivably you can stem the tide at a certain point.
The difficulty is, you can nevermore outrun your opponents. Every island you retreat to is under attack, so each time you relocate, you also ought to support those shores from all sorts of enemies in real-time, decisive combat. If you’re capable to defeat your opponents without allowing them to burn and pillage the houses on the island, you earn some money, which you’ll need to improve your troops so they can scale up to more difficult threats down the line.
The combat in Bad North is not particularly complicated. All of your troops attack automatically, so your job as the gamer is to strategically place your units so they can be most productive. This includes such things as relocating troops behind cover if there are ranged opponents incoming, or positioning pikemen at the top of a cliff to cut down at heavy brute units that might otherwise decimate army or crossbowmen.
What confuses things is execution and geology. As a real-time game, players need to be on location in positioning and re-positioning bands to respond to waves of incoming threats. And, with each island having different land features, the way you react will always be changing. To help make sure you have sufficient time to do all of this micromanagement, Bad North slows down the work whenever you pick a military unit. This doesn’t fully mitigate the time constraint, but it makes the game much easier.
Your units are only collections of eight or so little dudes, and with each fight, they decline. You need to send them to home to replenish or risk missing them forever, but while they’re recovering their numbers they’re helpless to respond to any enemies. Making the call at the wrong time will cost you greatly. Lose all your units and it’s game over, right behind to square one.
It’s hard to decide whether the ambiguous nature is part of the point or harms what originally seems like a fun, laid back approach experience. You react to approaching enemies carefully but easily—a nice option to more strategy games. Yet that all change on a dime with one single mistake. The result of failure feels at odds with the slow pace of combat.
There is a warfare map, randomly created with each new game, to worry about within missions, where you use upgrades and decide what island to tackle next. You get more rewards depending on how many cottages remain at the end of a level. You use those to level your units, allowing you to specialise into pikemen or archers, and pick special touches like a diving attack from clifftops. It’s all moderately straightforward but, like the charges themselves, doesn’t allow mistakes. Pick the obverse island or skill then tough, that’s it, no do-overs.
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