Bad North is a real-time tactics game about protecting your islands from viking raids. It is first and foremost a punishing game. If you do not enjoy punishing games that are punishing for the sake of being punishing, stay away from Bad North. You need to enjoy being punished heavily for tiny mistakes and not knowing how the game works. I don’t, and I don’t think it is a good design premise, and as such I don’t think the game is very good apart from that niche.
What the game is
In Bad North you control a squad of soldiers represented by a commander. The game has three different types of soldiers: archers, spearmen and infantry. The commanders can equip a single item that either provides a passive effect or an active ability. The commanders can also get a single active abiltiy; the archer will for example get the active ability “arrow rain” that can be used on a single tile. The units will automatically attack enemies that come close to the tile they are standing on. Moving the units to the correct tiles at the correct timings is amongst the most important aspects of the real-time tactic aspect of the game. The soldiers die very quickly if you misposition or move incorrectly. If all of the soldiers die, the commander is gone forever. Losing a commander can be the same as losing the entire campaign if the commander is one of the better ones.
Between the real-time tactic sections the game has a map that allows you to select which island you should go to next. Between the encounters you can upgrade the units during this phase. These upgrade are simple stat upgrades and does not change the gameplay. It is also during this phase that you select what type of unit a new commander should become. Every commander can fight once every turn. Each turn the “darkness” of the map moves from the right to the left, and if it catches you the game is over. In the image of the map above, the game is lost as the map has “caught up” while the commanders are fatigued.
My problems with Bad North
My biggest gripe with the game, which might be a selling point to other people is how punishing the game is. The game uses a lot of techniques to punish the player and therefore pad out the length of the game. I never felt like the game was challenging once I understood how it worked.
- The first issue you will run into is the game’s abysmal tutorial and explanation of how its mechanics work. I lost because I did not understand that commanders have permanent death. I lost because I did not understand that the map catching up means I lose. This is by far the biggest issue where the game is punishing because it does not tell you how mechanics work.
- The game lacks a legend to show what the different enemy icons mean, and I took a while to remember which icon where which. Meaning I choose the wrong units for the wrong island due to poor visual communication from the game.
- The restart map is toggled off by default I believe. The only purpose of not enabling restarting is to be punishing.
- Squishy units that die quickly and permanently with poor visual clarity of the health of the units.
- The camera is always centred on the middle of the island and only allows zooming and rotation. This means that you are frequently having a hard time looking at the island from a good angle.
- Terrain and other visual elements frequently clutter the screen as a way to make you miss the important elements that cause you to lose.
- The micro-managing of the units are implemented poorly.
- When you lose you lose a lot of progress. The game says it is a roguelite, but the progression between the campaigns are laughable insignificant and does not change the gameplay up to any significant extent.
Bad North is a real-time tactics game, which means that both tactics, and the real-time movement, or micro-management is important to the gameplay. I think the game’s complexity, and therefore its tactics is quite limited as discussed previously. The micro-management, or movement and controlling aspects are not much better.
You can select a unit by either clicking on it or by using a keybinding. You move the selected unit to a tile you select on the map. You use the abilities by selecting the units and then selecting the abilities with the mouse and then clicking on the tile it should be used. There is as far as I can tell no keybinding to select an ability. While a unit is selected time is slowed down significantly.
My first major issue with the controls of this game is is how the keybindings are handled. They are selected based on the order of deployment before the island starts. You cannot rebind these keys in game to suit your play-style, and are forced to use the predetermined keybindings. These keybindings are sometimes out of your control as you sometimes get a local commander you need to play with, which needs to be at the last keybinding. You can therefore not decide that a key-binding is a infantry or archer unit. The keybindings will change all the time without the ability to have a consistent set-up that is logical. To add injury to how the keybindings work there is no visual indication to see which colour or commander belongs to which keybinding on the screen. The only way you get to know is to select the unit and see which it is before you move it. This adds an unnatural step to a process that should be smooth and instant. Any of these implementations to improve either the visual clarity or allowing rebinding of keybindings would help immensely. However, the purpose of the game is to punish you, so the annoying bullshit that surrounds these keybindings is a feature, and not a bug. Keeping in mind that moving the wrong unit kills it within seconds and this keybinding mechanic makes you move the wrong unit frequently.
The game uses a reasonably good AI to target enemies within range passively. All you need to do in addition to moving the units is to use the active abilities. These abilities needs to target a tile at a specific timing window to be maximised. These abilities can only be used while the unit is selected, which means when time is slowed down significantly. If you wanted to time these abilities perfectly you need to wait for a long time while time is slowed significantly down. I wish the game allowed you to speed up the time slowing effect due to this. Timing abilities are incredible important, but is very awkward to do.
Conclusion:
While I dislike both the punishing nature of the game and the shallow mechanics of the game, the game does execute very well on that punishing gameplay loop and shallow mechanics. The AI targeting system is reasonably good. The archers will target the enemies they can kill before targeting enemies with shields for example. There are a lot of small details that keeps the game from being completely generic. The archers can shoot at an angle to push shield enemies into the sea. The spearmen will push enemies of cliffs to cause fall damage. These mechanics are both well implemented from a technical standpoint, but also from a visual perspective. The game executes on a shallow and punishing gameplay loop quite well if that is what you are into. However, a bad game design is still bad even though it is polished quite well.
| Playtime | 4.5 Hours |
| Game release date | 20 August 2018 |
| Review release date | 14 September 2024 |
| Light sensitivity | No issues |
| Sound sensitivity | No issues |
| Motion sickness | No issues |
| Steam | Metacritic – Metascore (74) |