Bad North (

2018

) ½

I'll admit, it bugged me a little bit that Assassin's Creed Valhalla [2020] had the unmitigated gall to make the Vikings unambiguous good guys and the British the unambiguous bad guys of the Viking Invasion of Britain. This even though the Vikings were the invading army that was doing the bulk of the invading and the pillaging! I look forward to Ubisoft's next game where you play a heroic German soldier in 1940s Poland, selflessly safeguarding the world against the Polish menace. I know that it's popular to hate on Britain because they left a voluntary economic union with the other European nations, can't seem to effectively prosecute any of the seemingly endless procession rape gangs roving their countryside, and can't even hope to beat their former colonial possessions in Cricket, but all this makes me more inclined to sympathize with the poor blokes. Seriously, this is a country that hasn't been able to catch a break for the past eighty years, to the point where they're nostalgic for the time they were standing alone against Nazi Germany! At least let them be the good guys in a game about the fucking Viking conquests for Christ's sake. Fortunately, for those of us so inclined there is Bad North, a lightweight RTS where you take command of an island nation repelling an invasion of blood-soaked Viking conquerors.

When I say lightweight, I'm not kidding. There are only three different units under your command (swordsmen, pikemen, and archers) and only seven types of enemies. Moreover, the objectives for each mission are always the same: defend the buildings on your current island from Vikings trying to burn them down until either all buildings are destroyed, all your troops are dead, or all the Vikings have been annihilated. There are no gimmick levels to mix up the basic formula, and no surprises save for the first time you encounter a new type of enemy (the huge Viking archers threw me through a loop the first time I faced them and they started immediately sniping my swordsmen from across the map).

That said, at least the one mission type that Bad North has is a fairly engaging one with enough meat and complexity to keep players constantly engaged. Each unit has its strengths and weakness, along with a role in which it excels. Pikemen for instance can hold a choke-point against even the heaviest Viking infantry, but in an open plain, the enemy troops will easily circumnavigate them to attack your soft targets. Ten-foot-long sharpened sticks don't lend themselves much to a War of Movement, so if any Vikings (even archers) attack them before they can get set up you can kiss your pikemen goodbye. Likewise, archers are invaluable for thinning out the Viking ranks before they make shore fall, but once the enemy gets in charge range they're helpless. Swordsmen are by far the most versatile unit, being able to deflect arrows with their shields and stand up to most Vikings in a straight fight, but their damage output is mediocre and you'll find your swordsmen depleted in short order if you try to have them do the heavy lifting of combat. The units are well balanced, and later levels will be almost impossible if you attempt them with a force that is lacking in any one area.

The pace of the combat is rapid, with most islands seeing a steady stream of Vikings arriving from a variety of directions. Usually, any lulls between the arrivals of additional Viking ships will be, by necessity, spent reposition your troops and getting them ready for the coming onslaught. You have the option to use intact houses to replenish your troops, however, that will remove that unit from the battle for a significant amount of time. A good deal of the challenge in Bad North is knowing when to peel a weakened unit away from the front lines for a chance to heal. Likewise, if things are looking really bad for a particular unit you can use a beached Viking transport ship to evacuate that unit to safety, a decision that would have been a great deal more tempting in the game's initial release when there was no option to replay a level if you lost and all destroyed units were permanently dead.

The game adds further complexity to this formula by giving each individual unit a special innate bonus (like having greater resistance to being knocked prone, taking less damage, or having a larger unit size). Each class of unit also has access to a special ability that can be upgraded (though I only ever found the pikeman's charge ability to be of any real use, as it allowed them to rapidly redeploy and do some damage in the process). The base stats of the units can be upgraded as well, which becomes vital as the Vikings start to outnumber your forces by a frankly ridiculous amount. Additionally, each unit can be equipped with an item that either adds passive buffs to the unit or gives it special abilities. A particular favorite of mine was the highly anarchistic landmines (at the time of the great Viking Invasion of Britain, gunpowder was a relatively new invention in China and effectively unknown outside of there), which allowed for a bunch of chances to lay cunning traps for enemy attackers.

The various upgrades give you a strong incentive to actually try to protect every house on each island and not just fortify yourself on the tallest hill, as each house standing at the end of the mission will grant you gold that you can spend on upgrades. This encourages the player to take more risks and try to defend the entire island whenever possible, making the combat much more complex and satisfying.

Visually, Bad North is pretty bland-looking. Individual soldiers are amorphous blobs with little tentacles that hold their weapons, and different shaped helmets that allow you to distinguish everyone. They look awful, but the trade-off is that each soldier can easily be fully animated and treated as an individual rather than just a part of a static formation. There are moments when you order a retreat and a few soldiers in the unit will be left isolated and cut off from the rest of their comrades. This adds a degree of chaos to even the most well-ordered battles, which prevents the simplistic formula from getting stale, at least for the first dozen hours anyway.

Bad North's instance on procedurally generated levels is more of a weakness than a strength. After playing through the entire game twice, almost no particular levels stand out in my memory. They are all technically unique, but none of them really feel special or interesting. Indeed, the only ones that do stand out in memory are the instances where the game's algorithm fucked up and gave me an island with a tiny strip of beach at the base of a cliff where all I needed to do was park a unit of pikemen at the ledge and massacre the entire invading army. These problems are mostly at the beginning of the game before the enemy unlocks effective counters (like archers) but they are common enough at the start that almost all players will see it happen at least once.

The game was originally released as a roguelike, but the developer has since made updates to it to minimize that dimension. Originally, the death of any unit was permanent, meaning that if you weren't careful you could be left with nothing to fight with after a few pitched battles. In a later release, the developer offered the option to restart battles after they ended (if you were defeated outright or even if you won at a higher cost than you would have liked).

This sloppy fix underlines some confusion in the game's overall design, as a game that takes around 8 hours to complete normally is poorly suited to be a roguelike for reasons that should be obvious. Roguelikes work best when they are short games where an entire run can easily be done in a single sitting. Moreover, there are no upgrades to unlock in Bad North and no reason to expect that your next run will fair any better. It can be frustrating to be kicked back to the start of the Gungeon after a 20 minute run with nothing more than a new weapon option for your trouble, but I can't imagine restarting Bad North after six hours with nothing more than a "better luck next time."

Yet aside from slapping the option to restart each battle after winning or losing it, Bad North doesn't do much to address how this change mucks with the game's overall balance. At the very least it means you'll be managing far more units in your roster than were ever intended. On the map screen, there are just way too many of these guys and there's no way to sort or group them. They're not even arranged according to unit type or level, just whatever order you happened to recruit them in. Having so much manpower at your disposal also quickly removes any tension there was from mission selection, as you have more than enough troops to tackle every objective on the map. Still, I would recommend taking advantage of the option to restart battles, as without it the game becomes almost unplayable around the halfway mark when the difficulty spikes.