Back to Home
Bad North: Jotunn Edition
game
•1/22/2026

Bad North: Jotunn Edition

byPlausible Concept, Oskar Stålberg
App StoreSteamGoogle PlayNintendo Switch
8.5
The Verdict
"Bad North: Jotunn Edition is a triumphant exercise in focused design. It is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be and executes on that vision with unwavering confidence. By stripping away the extraneous complexities of the strategy genre, Plausible Concept has revealed a core that is intensely challenging, strategically deep, and endlessly engaging. It is both a piece of art and a finely tuned tactical machine—a brutal, beautiful, and essential title for any fan of strategy and thoughtful game design."

Gallery

Screenshot 1
View
Screenshot 2
View

Key Features

Procedural Island Defense: Each campaign is a unique, procedurally generated sequence of islands. This ensures no two runs are identical, forcing players to constantly adapt their strategies to new layouts and enemy compositions.
Tactical Roguelite Structure: The core gameplay fuses real-time tactics with a roguelite progression system. You command units in brief, intense skirmishes, then use the rewards to upgrade your squads and unlock commander traits for the overarching campaign. The loss of a commander's squad is permanent, creating palpable stakes.
Minimalist Unit Control: You don't micro-manage individual soldiers. Instead, you direct squads of infantry, archers, or pikes, positioning them to counter specific threats. The game abstracts complex commands into simple, intuitive actions, focusing the player's attention entirely on high-level strategy and battlefield positioning.

The Good

Exceptionally clean and readable visual design
Deeply satisfying and addictive gameplay loop
Brilliant fusion of RTS, tower defense, and roguelite

The Bad

Difficulty can ramp up suddenly
A small mistake can lead to a campaign-ending cascade
Limited unit variety might feel repetitive for some

In-Depth Review

Bottom Line: Bad North is a masterwork of tactical distillation, packaging the strategic depth and punishing stakes of a real-time strategy campaign into a beautiful, accessible, and endlessly replayable roguelite.

Gameplay Loop

The gameplay rhythm of Bad North is deceptively simple and profoundly addictive. Each turn begins on the campaign map, a misty archipelago of islands. You select an island to defend, which immediately commits your available commanders to the fight. The battle itself is a compact, real-time engagement. Viking longships approach from the fog-shrouded sea, and your task is to position your squads to repel the invaders as they land. The genius of this system is its focus on proactive positioning rather than reactive micromanagement. You see the boats coming; you know what type of units they carry. The challenge is to move your limited forces to the optimal locations—placing archers on high ground to rain down arrows, setting pike formations to brace against a charge at the shoreline, or holding infantry in reserve to flank and crush exposed enemies.

Once an island is successfully defended, you are rewarded with gold, which is used to upgrade your commanders' squads. These upgrades are meaningful and direct: more soldiers per squad, better armor, or new abilities like the pikes' "Pike Charge." You may also find powerful items or new commanders to recruit. After the upgrade phase, your commanders, having exhausted themselves, must rest for a turn. This forces a critical decision: do you press forward with a different set of commanders, or do you wait, allowing the Viking horde to advance and consume islands behind you? This elegant push-and-pull creates a constant, low-grade tension that defines the campaign. The loss of a squad is devastating not just because you lose the soldiers, but because you lose all the gold and experience invested in that commander. This permanence of consequence, a hallmark of the roguelite genre, elevates every tactical encounter from a simple puzzle to a high-stakes gamble.

Strategic Depth & Interface

Bad North's user interface and visual design are triumphs of clarity. The clean, low-poly art style isn't just an aesthetic choice; it's a functional one. Enemy types are instantly recognizable, attack vectors are clear, and the state of your units is communicated through simple visual cues—bloodstains on their tunics indicate damage, and dwindling numbers show attrition. This readability allows players to make informed decisions in fractions of a second. The diorama-like islands can be rotated 360 degrees, allowing for careful inspection of terrain to find natural chokepoints and advantageous high ground.

The strategic depth emerges from the interplay of three core unit types in a classic rock-paper-scissors model. Infantry are your mobile workhorses, capable of blocking and flanking. Pikemen are defensive powerhouses, able to brace on a beach and annihilate any unit that charges them head-on, but they are vulnerable when repositioning. Archers provide essential ranged support, capable of thinning enemy ranks before they even make landfall, but they are fragile and easily overwhelmed in melee. The strategy, therefore, is a puzzle of counters and positioning. A successful defense is a ballet of well-timed maneuvers: luring brutes into a wall of pikes, using infantry to protect your archers' flanks, and sending a replenished squad to a newly threatened beach. The procedural generation of the islands and the varied composition of enemy waves ensure that this puzzle never grows stale. As noted by critics at PC Gamer and Nintendo Life, this accessibility does not compromise its capacity for punishing difficulty, demanding careful thought to prevent cascading losses that can quickly end a promising run.

Editorial Disclaimer

The reviews and scores on this site are based on our editorial team's independent analysis and personal opinions. While we strive for objectivity, gaming experiences can be subjective. We are not compensated by developers for these scores.