Five Feels: Bad North

You can understand the whole game in minutes

It’s hard to achieve this. Even in a simple game.

Here – you have an island, troops to command and buildings to defend. Viking raiders land on the beaches. You move your troops to different nodes on the island. Pikes keep enemies distant. Infantry guard you from arrows. Archers destroy enemies at range.

A simple tutorial and no tabbing out to a wiki.

No 30 mins onboarding and memorizing controls and mechanisms.

I was playing the game properly within 5 minutes of lanuching it.

Coming straight off of FTL: Faster Than Light where I was looking up dialogue answers on a wiki because there was no way to know in game, this felt like a gift.

I’m pushing this one first because it’s all to do with the first impression.

This is a real strength and eliminates a lot of early friction.

Leveling up archers felt great

Even though I will end up moaning about the lack of variety in classes… upgrading the archers felt awesome.

It’s usually my go to in strategy games.

In Total War games I’d love upgrading my archers or muskets and watch the reign of fire wipe out my enemies.

So, it’s kinda like a reflex.

When I’m presented with a unit to upgrade, I typically choose the ranged ones.

And I’m glad I did.

The upgrade was apparent immediately. All of a sudden – arrows landed more often and the improved damage dealt was clear.

And that was just 1 upgrade.

By the time I got my archers to the 3rd and final tier they were destroying the vikings.

The cherry on the icing was a Steam achievemnt praising me for my efforts:

That achievement felt delicious.

Like my choices were being watched & I had figured something out.

Remember, players love to feel like they’re smarter than the game.

Like they’ve figured out how it works and solved it.

Beating the developers at their own game.

I didn’t.

But the illusion I was fed felt terrific.

Units will stand and do nothing

But yikes.

Watching my pikemen stand 2 tiles away and being peppered with arrows, while they stood and did…

nothing.

Felt bad.

It’s by design though.

The game is an RTS-lite.

But has the positioning gameplay of a Turn Based Strategy game (TBS).

So, by design, I had to take my pikemen and manually move them closer before they’d retaliate.

It didn’t feel great. Hence the ‘bad’ feel log here.

And I think it’s a clash of genres.

Two features of opposite games that didn’t blend smoothly.

We’re used to aggro in RTS games.

When your units suffer from an attack, they gain aggro and move in to attack.

Here, it wasn’t the case.

And the lack of feedback just made it feel awkward.

Simple rock/paper/scissors is uninspiring

This keeps perfectly with the minimalist style of Bad North.

It’s an RTS lite after all.

And the RTS genre in general has always been about rock/paper/scissors combos.

But this is literally rock/paper/scissors.

No variation.

No smoke & mirrors.

You’ll figure it out in your first run (more than likely, within your first 30 mins).

After that, each raid follows the formula of:

Check the type of raider > Position the rock to meet their scissors > observe > repeat

And it gets old.

You get to throw in the odd bomb and minefield here and there which makes it more entertaining.

But I think the sorest part here is the absolute missed potential.

Looking at Steam reviews, it seems to be a fairly common sentiment.

An array of classes that do slight variations of their role would add such a level of depth & variety to Bad North.

Instead – Archers upgrade to stronger archers, same with pikemen and infantry.

There’s no branching unit paths or subclasses.

Just a number boost.

That’s why I never got into a state of flow.

Flow needs you to not know if it’s going to work. If you already know, you’re following a pre-concieved pattern, not playing.

Every game is a puzzle underneath.

Even Path of Achra – one of my top picks out of my full Steam library, can just boil down to a puzzle of numbers and damage types.

The difference is the illusion.

It’s like cars.

Every car has the same make up deep down.

But I want the one where the engine’s quiet and the dashboard isn’t screaming numbers at me.

I know what’s under there, I just don’t want to be looking at it while I’m driving.

Similar to my Dome Keeper post – this is a game that the Steam audience loves – boasting 94% positive on Steam from over 5500 reviews.

But if you take a look at Metacritic, you’ll see Bad North sitting on a 72/100 critic score & 7/10 user score.

The game is well praised for good reason.

Although, I do feel like Hades changed the standards of a ‘roguelite’ to the audience when it released in Early Access a year after Bad North.

So, with a much more packed roguelite market today.

Combined with a hunger for ‘minimalist genre’ games…

I’d be interested to see the reception for Bad North, had it released in 2026, rather than 2018.

Every run starts exactly the same

I had been playing Thronefall prior to picking up Bad North.

FYI, I’m huge fan of how Thronefall implemented rewards, meta progress and making losses feel like progress.

So, when I lost my first run on Bad North, I sat waiting for the progress bar to fill up.

Or even something telling me what my meta reward was.

Nothing happened.

There’s traits & items you can find, which are then applied to commanders on your next run.

But with the state of the roguelite market in 2026, after hits like Vampire Survivors, Balatro, Hades, etc..

It feels underwhelming.

All I could think about again, was the missed opportunity.

Imagining playable clans, with varying abilities and units.

A berserker clan, who had access to an axe wielding berserker unit.

Or a beast master clan, whose ravens would flock down on the enemies as they landed on the beach.

Instead, each time I failed a run, I knew I had to go through the same battles to at the early game to get back to where I was.

I felt a lack of control over my approach to playing.

And one thing a roguelite must always get right is making sure the player feels in control.