Bad North Jotunn Edition

I came into Bad North expecting something polished but shallow, a pretty indie curio from Raw Fury's catalogue. What I got instead was a loop I couldn't put down for an embarrassingly long sitting. The game strips the real-time tactics formula to its studs: you control up to four commanders, each leading a squad typed into one of three classes, archers, swordsmen with shields, and pikemen, and you are herding those tiny troops across procedurally generated island terrain while Viking longships beach from multiple directions. There are no tech trees the size of a Paradox DLC, no spreadsheets required. The complexity arrives from the terrain itself and the pressure of simultaneous landings. The class interplay is tighter than the minimalist presentation suggests. Pikemen are immovable walls when braced, but a flanking archer volley or a berserker breaking their formation collapses everything instantly. Swordsmen block incoming arrows and can plunge off cliffs to stun clusters of enemies below, a mechanic that feels incredible when timed right. Archers reward high ground positioning but crumble in melee. The Jotunn Edition update layered thirteen commander traits and additional equippable items on top of this foundation, which genuinely changes how you build a roster each run. You lean into a fast, aggressive archer commander who got the "flanker" trait, or you shore up a defensive pike wall with an item that boosts armor. The decision space is narrow but every choice carries weight. Where the game earns its 93% Steam approval rating is in its tension model. The pace auto-slows when you click a commander, giving you just enough breathing room to reposition without pausing entirely. That one design choice is why a newcomer can engage seriously with the game from the first run. The "allow level restarts" toggle, which lets you replay a failed island without losing a commander permanently, is also a genuinely smart beginner accommodation that the game surfaces immediately. Turn it off when you want the real thing: permadeath for commanders means a bad read of the enemy approach angle can gut your run several hours in, and that sting is absolutely the point. Hard mode with no restarts is where the game fully justifies its roguelite label. The honest criticism is that content runs thin before the mechanics do. Three troop classes each with a single active ability is a compact kit, and while items and traits from the Jotunn update add run-to-run variation, a single campaign clears in roughly three to five hours. Replayability comes from difficulty escalation and procedural island shapes rather than an expanding unlock tree. Players expecting the build variety of a deeper roguelite will hit a ceiling and feel it. There is no mod ecosystem to speak of either, which is a gap that stings for anyone coming from more extensible strategy titles. What the game offers instead is a near-perfect execution of a specific, tight idea, and the randomly generated campaigns hold up across several runs before the patterns start repeating. For strategy players who regularly bounce off dense games due to tutorial overload, Bad North is worth serious attention. The approachability is real, not a condescending hand-holding exercise, and the higher difficulty settings provide the kind of tactical punishment that rewards methodical positioning and island-shape reading over reflexes. It is short, it is focused, and it knows exactly what it is.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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