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Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This?
July 15, 2009 | 9:20 PM PST
by: Matt Furtado
Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game's About
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This? doesn't only have an awesomely unique name, it's also a really unique game. Unlike anything we've seen on the PSP thus far, Badman takes an interesting take on the defense tower genre with a pinch of strategic gameplay. You take the roll of a god to a Demon Overlord. He will pray to you for help and protection from the "evil" good warriors who are pursuing you to capture him for the evil cretin he is. To protect him from these incoming invaders, you'll tunnel numerous paths underground and control a living ecosystem of demonic creatures that will become your own little army of darkness.
What's Hot
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is something truly special. With such a unique gameplay style, Badman will shatter any ideas you had on what strategy games should be. To be successful in the game, you'll need to do a few a things. Firstly, you'll need to play the tutorials and get a firm grasping of what the game is presenting to you. The tutorials are straightforward and simple enough. You'll learn the basics of digging a complex tunnel system, how to get certain creatures to spawn via the soil blocks, and how you can get the soil to change in density to form other demonic creatures. The most basic creature you'll spawn is primordial ooze. This ooze, like the evolution theory would suggest, is the building block of all other complex life. These will suck the nutrients out of the soil, which will in turn allow for different creatures to take root. Also, when an ooze is killed by either you or an enemy, the nutrients they carry will also go into the soil and help give birth to another ground dweller. Besides oozing around and passing nutrients to other soil cubes, the ooze will also help evolve some of your little demons. One of the demons craves the nourishment the ooze provides and this will evolve them to their next level making them more efficient in battle.
Once you get a firm understanding of the ecosystem and how some creatures come into being through this world, you'll find a vast amount of creatures you can get and level up. Every character can be leveled up to a certain maximum. The weaker the creatures are, the quicker and easier it'll be to reach their max power. You'll need to choose which creatures you want to level up accordingly, because if you quickly level up the weaker species, then you'll be powerless against the stronger enemies. You need to find a good balance between leveling up your demonic army to fit the way you're tunneling your complex underground dungeon. These two things will interlink with each other in the later levels.
Now for the heart of the game: the strategy. You need to tunnel your dungeon appropriately to make it really efficient in battle and in army creation. Of course, you don't want to make it too linear that the invading warriors of good can easily find the Demon Overlord. You'll want some tricks and turns in your dungeon but you'll want the setup of the dungeon to be complex enough and simple enough that you can have a powerful army scattered throughout the tunnels and guarding the Overlord. You'll need to learn to craft these types of levels because there are a lot of levels to play.
What's Not
The game can be very hard for some. The tunneling aspect and the lack of control over your army can be difficult to come to terms with for some of us. You need to allow the game to give birth to your army based on the environment and they'll wander about in their own little fashion. You have absolutely no control over where they'll go or where they'll stay. Most of the time, they'll reside in their birth places and just wander in the surrounding tunnel in the area. Aside from that, you need to learn to conquer the levels at your own pace. This will mean a lot of failing and trying over and over again until you find yourself a winning strategy. NIS America is offering some videos to help you find your way through the levels and helping you better understand the gameplay. So, you should definitely use the resources available to you.
Final Word
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is a very enjoyable game once you understand the gameplay. You need patience and must be willing to fail here and there. What did I do to deserve to play such a game? Being only downloadable, you should be sure to checkout the demo and see if you like the game. This is a great handheld game and one of NIS' best offerings of 2009.
What the Game's About
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This? doesn't only have an awesomely unique name, it's also a really unique game. Unlike anything we've seen on the PSP thus far, Badman takes an interesting take on the defense tower genre with a pinch of strategic gameplay. You take the roll of a god to a Demon Overlord. He will pray to you for help and protection from the "evil" good warriors who are pursuing you to capture him for the evil cretin he is. To protect him from these incoming invaders, you'll tunnel numerous paths underground and control a living ecosystem of demonic creatures that will become your own little army of darkness.
What's Hot
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is something truly special. With such a unique gameplay style, Badman will shatter any ideas you had on what strategy games should be. To be successful in the game, you'll need to do a few a things. Firstly, you'll need to play the tutorials and get a firm grasping of what the game is presenting to you. The tutorials are straightforward and simple enough. You'll learn the basics of digging a complex tunnel system, how to get certain creatures to spawn via the soil blocks, and how you can get the soil to change in density to form other demonic creatures. The most basic creature you'll spawn is primordial ooze. This ooze, like the evolution theory would suggest, is the building block of all other complex life. These will suck the nutrients out of the soil, which will in turn allow for different creatures to take root. Also, when an ooze is killed by either you or an enemy, the nutrients they carry will also go into the soil and help give birth to another ground dweller. Besides oozing around and passing nutrients to other soil cubes, the ooze will also help evolve some of your little demons. One of the demons craves the nourishment the ooze provides and this will evolve them to their next level making them more efficient in battle.
Once you get a firm understanding of the ecosystem and how some creatures come into being through this world, you'll find a vast amount of creatures you can get and level up. Every character can be leveled up to a certain maximum. The weaker the creatures are, the quicker and easier it'll be to reach their max power. You'll need to choose which creatures you want to level up accordingly, because if you quickly level up the weaker species, then you'll be powerless against the stronger enemies. You need to find a good balance between leveling up your demonic army to fit the way you're tunneling your complex underground dungeon. These two things will interlink with each other in the later levels.
Now for the heart of the game: the strategy. You need to tunnel your dungeon appropriately to make it really efficient in battle and in army creation. Of course, you don't want to make it too linear that the invading warriors of good can easily find the Demon Overlord. You'll want some tricks and turns in your dungeon but you'll want the setup of the dungeon to be complex enough and simple enough that you can have a powerful army scattered throughout the tunnels and guarding the Overlord. You'll need to learn to craft these types of levels because there are a lot of levels to play.
What's Not
The game can be very hard for some. The tunneling aspect and the lack of control over your army can be difficult to come to terms with for some of us. You need to allow the game to give birth to your army based on the environment and they'll wander about in their own little fashion. You have absolutely no control over where they'll go or where they'll stay. Most of the time, they'll reside in their birth places and just wander in the surrounding tunnel in the area. Aside from that, you need to learn to conquer the levels at your own pace. This will mean a lot of failing and trying over and over again until you find yourself a winning strategy. NIS America is offering some videos to help you find your way through the levels and helping you better understand the gameplay. So, you should definitely use the resources available to you.
Final Word
Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! is a very enjoyable game once you understand the gameplay. You need patience and must be willing to fail here and there. What did I do to deserve to play such a game? Being only downloadable, you should be sure to checkout the demo and see if you like the game. This is a great handheld game and one of NIS' best offerings of 2009.
February 8, 2010
