Bad North

Bad North is a real-time tactics roguelite where you command small squads of soldiers defending a series of procedurally generated island chains against Viking raiders. Each island is a self-contained puzzle: enemies storm the beaches from multiple directions, your units move on a grid-free map, and you position archers on high ground, pikemen at chokepoints, and swordsmen wherever the line is thinnest. Run ends are permanent. Lose a commander and that unit slot is gone for the rest of the campaign. It is light on UI chrome and heavy on consequence. From a systems perspective, the game is more layered than its clean visual style suggests. Each of your three unit types (swords, bows, pikes) has a commander who levels up and unlocks upgrades over a run. Those upgrades stack into small but meaningful build paths. You are not building a 40-slot spreadsheet here, but you are absolutely making decisions about whether to rush ranged upgrades for early-island control or invest in melee durability for the late campaign push when shieldbreakers and fire archers start arriving in numbers. Island selection on the world map adds a light meta-layer: you pick your route, weighing safe coinage stops against higher-reward contested landings. That single decision loop keeps runs feeling distinct without demanding encyclopedic knowledge. For newcomers to tactics games, the tutorial is honest and quick. The controls are genuinely minimal and the game never buries you in menus. That said, difficulty spikes are real and not always telegraphed. The mid-campaign shift, when enemy unit compositions start mixing heavy infantry with ranged support, will catch underprepared players off guard. Losing a well-upgraded commander at that stage can effectively end a run two islands later when attrition catches up. There is no mid-run save scumming. Some players will find that friction satisfying; others will bounce off it fast. Know which one you are before sitting down. On the strategy side, the AI is competent but predictable after a handful of runs. Enemies follow fixed landing patterns that you learn to read, and once you internalize the threat hierarchy, the game becomes more about execution under pressure than genuine tactical surprise. That is the ceiling. Runs start to feel similar around the 15-hour mark, and the mod ecosystem on PC is thin compared to what strategy veterans expect. Replayability leans on difficulty settings and personal challenge rather than emergent content depth. It is a tightly scoped game, not a wide one. Still, within that scope, Bad North does something most tactics games fail to do: it makes every island feel urgent without overstaying its welcome. Sessions run 20 to 40 minutes. The aesthetic is genuinely clean, not lazy, and the minimalist audio cues replace tooltips efficiently. If you want a tactics fix that respects your time, runs in short bursts, and teaches its systems through failure rather than tutorials, this holds up well. Just accept that the late-game plateau arrives sooner than the 93% Steam approval rating might imply.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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