DeathSpank: The Baconing Review
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Though we initially overlooked the first two games, Hothead have been steadily churning out DeathSpank games since 2010. The third and most recent in the series, The Baconing, was released last summer. Dropping the usual DeathSpank prefix for reasons not entirely clear, and the first game in the series not to be contributed to by Ron Gilbert, The Baconing is an by-the-numbers action-RPG which relies more on its humor than its compelling gameplay to keep things moving. While entertaining, ultimately the game suffers from several issues with its game mechanics and design, and depends on its witty dialogue and characters a bit more than it should.
I will admit right off the bat that The Baconing is my first game in the DeathSpank series. As such, my frame of reference for the game is different than those who have played the previous games. I have done my research, though, so have a pretty solid idea of what's new and what's not so new.
Story? What's That?
DeathSpank, the game's hero, is basically the ultimate stereotype of the big, dumb good guy. Dressed more like a Marvel superhero than a fantasy game protagonist, DeathSpank's bravado is only matched by his general ineptitude at anything other than hitting monsters with big weapons. The game opens with him living in the lap of luxury after his previous world-saving outings in the previous two titles. Unfortunately, his previous quest to collect the Thongs of Virtue hasn't been so successful after all - his simultaneous wearing of the all undergarments has caused the creation of an opposite version of himself, the AntiSpank. DeathSpank's quest thus requires him to destroy the Thongs of Virtue in the legendary Bacon Fires throughout the land to weaken his nemesis. Does it make any sense? Not in the least, but then, it doesn't really need to.
The story in The Baconing is really just an excuse to get the player from once ridiculous setting to the next, and to give a series of sub-goals to work towards. Apparently technology moves forward at an alarming pace in DeathSpank's world, as now the game is set in a more-or-less modern time period (although computers still seem to run on punch cards). This new theme gave Hothead more opportunity to expand the game world. My favorite area was probably Barnacle Lake, a more non-linear section where DeathSpank has to captain a pirate ship from island to island. Others, like the Irish-themed, leprechaun-filled Rainbow's End casino, feel a little under-developed in comparison, but are still absurd enough to be entertaining and offer nice visual variety.
Spanking Out Death
As I mentioned earlier, The Baconing is a very standard action-RPG - the game employs a top-down perspective and more or less plays out in two dimensions. The Baconing is built almost entirely around combat, although you will have to solve a few adventure game-style puzzles along the way - Hothead clearly showing their roots here. There's a good sense of pacing as you'll never stay in a given location for too long, doing the same thing over and over, as new quests, characters, and puzzles appear pretty regularly. If there's one complaint I have about the non-combat stuff, is that it's a bit heavily reliant on fetch quests. The game is at its best when you're working out its puzzles or figuring out which order to complete tasks in, and no amount of dialogue can make "collect 14 bundles of felt for me" any more interesting than it sounds.
When you are fighting, you have a few options available. Melee attacks are obvious enough, but ranged attacks are surprisingly useful, as they can be charged up to fire explosive rounds, or in an arc based on the weapon you have, and the damage they do can be considerable. As you do damage, you fill up a "Justice" meter, which allows you to unleash a special attack when filled - although these are limited to certain weapon types. It's pretty simple, but smart choices like making ranged weapons, grenades, and elemental weapons useful in different situations means you'll need to take advantage of most of your arsenal.
For an action-RPG of this nature, The Baconing is actually quite difficult - I started out on the hard difficulty expecting to get a moderate challenge, but I was shocked at how I ended up dying dozens of times within the tutorial zone. I put the game back down to the normal difficulty, and things went better, but I still had a heck of a time on a couple of bosses and would frequently die despite this; my total death count must have been near a hundred. Unfortunately, it isn't really the good kind of difficulty - sometimes you'll run into enemies that do huge amounts of damage, and it becomes almost impossible to manage blocking and attacking against groups of them. Combined with the game's effectively free death and frequent checkpoints, it encourages (and often requires) you to chip away at packs of powerful enemies over and over, rather than win based on your skill in battle.
The thing that makes or breaks these top-down hack-and-slash RPGs for me is the character system and the loot mechanics, since that's more or less what the games revolve around. Unfortunately, The Baconing is disappointing in this regard. While the game does provide lots of loot, armor follows a completely fixed path (you find location-specific sets and even auto-equip it by default), and the weapons are almost all just upgrades on concepts, i.e. swords that do a bit more damage. There is good variety, but you will burn through equipment so quickly, and the improvements are so linear, that equipping stuff is rarely interesting. Likewise, the leveling-up is almost non-interactive - you'll pick from "hero cards" each time that give extra bonuses, but they're modest at best, and by the end of the game you'll max everything out anyway.
Honey, I Broke The Game
While The Baconing has some solid combat, and again, is more challenging than many other games on the default level (the unlockable "insanity" mode really must be insane), it also suffers from a case of mechanical schizophrenia, which I gather is true of all the other DeathSpank titles. It's not so much a problem with any particular part of the game, so much as it is the way the different aspects of it interact, that leads to issues.
First off, The Baconing is very heavily driven by potion-chugging. DeathSpank himself is actually a very squishy hero even when maxed out and equipped with the best gear. Furthermore, he's fairly slow, even with upgraded speed, which means it's basically impossible to dodge enemy attacks by default. Blocking can help, as can a useful shield-bash move, but the parry functions available are a bit too imprecise to be relied upon. This means that you have one recourse - constantly drink potions, whether to boost your speed, armor or health.
On the one hand, this sounds like a good thing. Too many RPGs offer useless consumables, and it's nice to see a game that really requires you to make use of them. However, The Baconing also imposes strict limits, as you can only carry five of each type of potion at once. This is done to encourage you to use the game's heal-over-time items, various types of food. Again, sounds good in theory, but in practice this doesn't really work. The healing effect of food is instantly mitigated by taking any action other than moving, or by taking damage (or, annoyingly, opening the menu, map, inventory, talking to an NPC, etc.). Since combat is as frequent as it is, you won't be able to effectively use food in battle except when kiting enemies, and when battle's over, you'll have to stand in place for a good long time while DeathSpank noms his hobo stew. This is just not fun, and directly contradicts the game's fast, forward-moving pace - as does the alternative of constantly running back to town to "potion up".
Similarly, the focus on other consumables, including various grenades to throw, elemental bolts to shoot, orbs to activate, and so on, gives you a lot of useful options... but also clutters up the game's quick slots, especially as you can't use consumables from the inventory itself. No matter whether you have a keyboard or a gamepad, you're limited to four active items, and considering how dependent you become on them, your alternative is to ignore all but the most essential, or constantly swap the items on your quick slots. While an interface limitation spawned by limited gamepad real estate, it also conflicts with the gameplay itself, which generally requires you make use of everything you have. In this case, a radial menu for gamepads or more quick-slots on the keyboard would have made a world of difference. Even after beating the game's final boss, I had no idea what several of my consumable items even did, because it was just way too inconvenient to manage all of them across four buttons. If it was an intentional attempt at balancing them, well, "making it too annoying to use all your items" does not exactly qualify as good game design in my book.
Last, there are a few other minor gameplay issues that added up enough to be worth mentioning. While death is almost free, you do drop a significant portion of your money when you fall in combat - while normally you can pick it up again, sometimes you'll end up respawning in a different area; since items don't persist between area transitions, your cash in those cases is gone forever. Enemies also respawn quite frequently, so sometimes you'll die just getting from one side of an area to another, or fight off enemies in areas you previously cleared when you return to complete a side-quest. These sorts of things, and more, happen just often enough to become grating over the long term.
Style Over Substance
As much as I complain about The Baconing's gameplay issues, the reality is that it is still a lot of fun to play almost entirely by virtue of the presentation. The Baconing has a fantastic aesthetic, and is frequently hilarious. Humor is a subjective thing, but if you in any way enjoy the absurdity of Ron Gilbert's other games (or the work of his associate Tim Schafer, at Double Fine), you will walk away from The Baconing with a dumb, goofy grin on your face. The game has the perfect balance of wit, parody and crassness, from sight gags like "DLC Under Construction" signs littering one of the game's areas, to quest chains that see DeathSpank doing significantly more damage than he actually prevents on his "heroic" quest. Even without Ron Gilbert involved here, Hothead have still done a fantastic job.
The game also looks and sounds great. Like the humor, not everyone will enjoy the cartoony, pop-up-book quality the visuals have, but it's very charming and immediately reminds me both of Nintendo's Paper Mario games and Hothead's previous Penny Arcade Adventures series, which I enjoyed as well. The soundtrack is a catchy, jazzy post-rock-sounding thing, with nice drum grooves and slightly dissonant guitars and keyboards, and the voice-acting, while not always of "professional quality", is quite effective. Most lower-budget games don't have the greatest production values, but Hothead turn it into an advantage by going for a very distinct style that's eye-catching without requiring the work of a thousand computer animators chained to a thousand computers.
As stylish as the game is, though, I did run into a few technical problems while playing. Though for the most part the game ran at a smooth 60 frames per second on my PC, and both the gamepad and keyboard/mouse controls worked great, I encountered very frequent crashes while playing, often while navigating menus using the mouse (this did not happen when using my gamepad). I never lost a lot of progress due to the game's frequent checkpointing, but a crash every 30-50 minutes is, frankly, not acceptable in this day and age. I didn't play the console versions of the game, but I've also read that the PlayStation 3 version suffers from framerate problems, so buyers might want to keep in mind that their experience might not be entirely smooth no matter what platform.
Conclusion
There's another elephant in the room, and that's the other DeathSpank games. I haven't played them, as I mentioned, but aside from some very minor additions (like the shield-bash, and improvements to co-op), all I've seen indicates there are basically no changes to the formula over the previous titles. I can appreciate that Hothead Games have a template to build on, and are a fairly small developer who need to make the most of what they have... but I think gamers should expect more. Much like the King's Bounty or Mount and Blade games, Hothead risk burning fans out by effectively re-releasing new episodes of the same game over and over with only minor upgrades.
The Baconing is the kind of game I wish was made more often. It appeals to my sense of humor on an almost psychic level, it looks great, and it made me laugh and smile more than pretty much any game I've played in months. Still, there's no ignoring that was frequently a frustrating experience, both on gameplay and technical levels - I can forgive a lot when a game stands out from the crowd, but The Baconing stretches that sentiment to the limit for me. As much as I liked The Baconing, I think Hothead will really need to shake things up for the next installment to keep fans interested.
