Bad North: Jotunn Edition

Bad North sells its premise in a single screenshot: tiny, procedurally shaped islands, a low-poly kingdom on fire, and a handful of loyal commanders standing between panicked villagers and a fleet of Viking longships. Plausible Concept's real-time tactics roguelite launched on Switch on 20 August 2018, reached PC soon after, and picked up the free Jotunn Edition content update — the version Steam's storefront now lists by name — later that same year. Seven years on, it's held a remarkably stable Very Positive 93.2% across 6,561 reviews, with the last hundred English reviews (93% positive) landing almost exactly on that lifetime figure. This is not a game whose reputation has faded or spiked — it's settled, and its fans are unusually specific about the one thing keeping it from settling higher.

Beautiful, clever, and — its own fans keep saying — too short

Pull the hundred most-helpful English negative reviews and one complaint towers over every other: there simply isn't enough game here for what it costs. "Very few different units (3 for you, 4 or 5 for the computer). First 30 maps are very tedious without any challenge," reads one detailed negative with 149 votes, a specific tally rather than a vague gripe. Another, with 118 votes, calls it "great little game, but way too simple & too little content for the price" — while explicitly saying they're not refunding it, because they like supporting the developers anyway, a telling split between what a reviewer feels about a studio and what they feel about the product. A third, comparing it directly against genre peers, tells readers outright to "go play Dead Cells, Rogue Legacy, FTL, Into The Breach, Wizard of Legend" instead.

The achievement data gives that complaint a rough shape. 94.2% of players hold the achievement for the very first mission, and only 5.0% hold the one most consistent with finishing the game — a steep drop that's partly just how most games' completion curves look, but it lines up with reviewers who describe running out of new things to see well before the campaign ends. Balance complaints run alongside the content ones: several reviewers, including some who still recommend the game, describe specific islands or Viking compositions as unfairly weighted rather than cleanly, tactically hard.

What earns it a Very Positive score anyway

None of that erases what Bad North does well, and the positive corpus is just as specific about it. "Great minimalist tactics game with superb design," reads one 49-vote positive, praising the adjustable difficulty and restart-level option for keeping the game's harder edges from turning into pure frustration. The tactical core — splitting a handful of commanders across a small island's chokepoints and terrain to hold off landing waves — draws praise even from critical reviewers who otherwise wish there were more of it. And the art style is close to undisputed: low-poly islands that manage to look painterly rather than cheap, still cited as a highlight by reviewers writing years after launch.

One older review flags the game busy-waiting the CPU at over 200% usage even sitting idle at a menu — a real technical complaint worth naming, though this review has no way to confirm whether it's still present in the current build years of patches later, so it's included here as a historical data point rather than a live warning.

Final verdict

Bad North is a genuinely elegant idea, well enough executed that reviewers keep recommending it even in the middle of complaining about it — a rare shape for a review corpus to take. The Very Positive score is earned by the concept, the art and a tactical core that clicks quickly; the specific, repeated pushback on price-to-content ratio and shallow late-game variety is earned too, and it's consistent enough across seven years of reviews that it isn't a launch-week overreaction. Buy it for a tight, good-looking few hours, ideally at a discount — and don't go in expecting the deep, expanding roguelite loop its closest genre neighbours offer.