Then enemies start coming in waves from all angles, and even though you’re still fighting from the higher ground, suddenly the strategy shifts to figuring out how to best split your forces. The viking boats come in on trajectories that make it easy to determine exactly where they will land, and you can set up your units to stop them right there at the beach, with minimal loss of life on your side.Īt least, that’s how things are at first. But here, in Bad North, you’re the one fighting from high ground. Traditionally, your opponents are generally the ones positioned in strategically defensible positions that you then need to work out how to overcome. In most cases, in a tactics strategy game, your side is the one that’s up against the difficult odds. This is manageable because time slows right down when you’re issuing orders to units, and the islands themselves are small in scale so relatively easy to monitor and move around.Įnemies – the vikings – come in waves on boats, and subtly Bad North inverts the normal order for tactics strategy games in a way that I found to be incredibly appealing. Islands are broken up into “squares” and you direct your units around just as you would in a tactics RPG, but rather than taking turns, the action plays out in real time. Once you’ve selected the island to defend, and the forces that you’ll use, Bad North shifts to a real-time tactics game.

As with any “roguelike” the layout of maps is randomised, and sometimes you just won’t get lucky enough to have any hope of getting through the rapidly escalating difficulty, but overall the game is balanced just right such that if you’re clever about what you’re doing, you should be able to push deep into the campaign at each attempt. Others have buildings that, if saved from the vikings, yield cash that can be used to increase the power of your units. Some might give you additional units to add to your forces. If you’ve played something like FTL, then you’ll be familiar with this system effectively it means you can’t backtrack, and won’t be able to visit every island, so you’ll need to be strategic about how you chart your course through the levels.Įach island offers something a little different. These islands are arrayed on a map screen with a dotted line on the back constantly “absorbing” islands, forcing you to constantly push on and fight on more difficult islands. Your goal in Bad North is to protect a series of islands from increasingly aggressive attacks from vikings. Related reading: Structurally, this Bad North shares a bit in common with FTL.

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