When Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman was first announced I thought this could be the next great retro-inspired game of the year. After playing the preview of the game I was still convinced of the same thing. Now, Im just not sure what to think. The game grew on me slowly over time as I explored the dynamics of the soil management system, but as strategy became more complex I started to slowly fall out of love with the game.
So much of Badman revolves around a dungeon economy system. First you start with pleasant little slimes that can grow into flowers that shoot attacks, and while bumping into walls and bumbling around your dungeon they will absorb and distribute nutrients into the soil. This soil is set up in a giant square grid that the player can excavate to birth new creatures (like the slime, and eventually mages and dragons). Breaking up the soil with a pick is about the only interaction that the player has with the world of Badman, the rest is left up to nature to see how things play out.
The best organization of your dungeon is to create paths that your slimes, and other helpful bad guys will navigate in the most effective way to kill those pesky good guys who are trying to capture your main character. The problem with this is that most of the time those good guys will invade your dungeon far to quickly to make a promising dungeon. After you learn this for your first time the best path to take is going back to training and challenges to learn new tactics.
There are two modes of gameplay in Badman: the puzzle-esque training and challenge mode, and the Story mode. Players will probably spend a majority of their time pouring over the slew of tutorials and challenges presented in the first mode, and occasionally feel like banging their head against the story mode. Its not that the story mode is bad; its just infuriatingly difficult past the more basic levels.
In the challenges much of the dungeon is laid out for you, with very specific goals to be met. The goals, for the most part, are obtainable, understandable, and not under heavily compressed time frames. They range from simple nutrient management tasks, to challenging good guy invasion survival. They are far more entertaining than the tongue-in-cheek JRPG spoofing story mode, easy to understand, and plentiful.
Anyone with a long history of playing RPGs knows that training isnt where the majority of the game should be spent though; its the story that we all want to see. For Badman that story is hidden behind a lock and key of difficulty. Im not squeamish about challenging games, far from it. The difficulty comes more from the speed in which a player is expected to complete tasks and the basic inability to control the things that will fight in your stead.
The story that is there is very humorous, and a little naughty (one of the returning good guys is named Shota). Its a shame that I never got to see all of it even though I accomplished most of the challenges in the other mode. I really wanted to too, its just that there were some basic design issues with the story mode that ramp up the difficulty a little too high. The only benefit of this is that the story mode is short, almost like an arcade game: its quickly and easily repeated, often with failure resulting for the same reasons the last time you tried it.
score 7.0 out of ten
verdict If youre thinking of picking up the game, go into it knowing about the steep difficulty of the story mode, and try out the demo first. I recommend the game with the caveat that you may never obtain the skills needed to see the end of the story, just like arcade games of old.
Please note: if you have come to this page via Metacritic, please click this link before posting a comment. Comments posted after directly coming here via a Metacritic link are currently not showing up properly.
Words
