The Baconing Review

When Deathspank released last year I was in love with its gameplay, environment, and witty humor you don’t see very much in games anymore. Thongs of Virtue came out a month later with some new additions, but was obviously more of an expansion pack than a proper sequel. This time around Hothead Games have knocked Deathspank’s name off the title of The Baconing and are calling this title an actual sequel to the previous games. It’s such a shame that The Baconing ends up feeling like another expansion with less improvements than TOV had.

The Baconing
Developer: Hothead Games
Price: $15.00
Platform: PS3 (reviewed), PC, Mac, & Xbox 360

The game starts out with the ‘evil’ ending from Thongs of Virtue where our ‘hero’ Deathspank killed Sandy and kept the thongs of power for himself. He decides it’s a good idea to wear them all and this brings an evil entity known as the Anti-Spank into existence. It’s now your job to burn the thongs in the fires of bacon. I never had any issue with Deathspank’s story, but the fact that the fires of bacon extinguish each time he tosses a thong in and has to find another fire of bacon to burn the next thong seems like a lame attempt at extending the excuse of a story they put together (yo Deathspank, just toss them all in at once?). The game just really feels like a downgrade from TOV and it’s not hard to look at the game and see how lazily everything was done. There are barely any *real* bosses such as Santa, the Ork Sergent, or the evil cooking show host. Hell even the trophy icons are just ripped from the last games. I think the icon for reflecting 100 projectiles is the image of the Japanese word bubble from TOV (for the learning Japanese sidequest), which makes no sense since she has nothing to do with this game. Most of the humorous parts of the game come from the reuse of past characters, but their skits are pretty predictable considering we’ve heard their jokes in 2 games already. Hell even most of the humor isn’t even that funny anymore. I was always laughing during Deathspank or TOV, but this time around I found myself barely chuckling in The Baconing. The worst thing about this is that TOV was done right after the first game was finished while Hothead have been working on this much longer.

Alright, let me mention the map. I loved the map in the last two games since each area was beautifully drawn, you could see all the paths drawn out, and it really helped show that you’re exploring this fantastic place. In The Baconing the map is taking some tips from the pip-boy (Fallout) and is completely green with nothing to see but the *linear* path. It also felt as if you were being pushed to the next ‘level’ instead of reaching a new area like the last games felt. Now what I liked about the previous games was that some quests took you all around the map and some had to be found off the main path of the map, hell I think I had a few friends who didn’t even find some areas because they simply didn’t explore/do a side-quest that would’ve lead them there. This time around there are no extra paths to explore with the game being as linear as Final Fantasy 13, and all the side-quests can be finished within the first minute you get it. Deathspank wasn’t exactly non-linear, but The Baconing is nowhere near as open as it. I feel comfortable calling Deathspank and Thongs of Virtue an open-world game, I wouldn’t give The Baconing the pleasure of receiving that title.

Hothead Games really kept boasting that The Baconing had a much deeper gameplay experience and that the AI was vastly improved upon, but I suppose they just learned how to bullshit to people. The AI still has the same patterns and I never saw them try to flank me like I was told they would do, you could easily stay out of their range and spam your arrows (hell, I’d go as far as saying they’ve bumped up the crossbow damage significantly making many fights easy mode), and the gameplay had no difference from before. They did tweak the shield mechanics a bit, even adding the ability to knock back projectiles, but this seemed totally useless since you’d have to keep your eye on the dozens of enemies swarming you AND the guys shooting at your from afar so you can block/reflect shots. One thing that hasn’t been fixed from the previous game is that when you try to use the circle-strafe strategy of locking-on to an enemy it sometimes won’t register hits on any other enemies besides the one you locked onto. Perhaps an option for the game to always lock-on to the closest enemy would improve things. Other than these things the gameplay is still basically untouched and is your basic hack/slash Diablo-clone game. Like Diablo, Deathspank is known for its loot gathering, and it does this well. You’ll come across some pretty sweet weapons such as unicorn fists, dragon airstrikes, drills of justice that summon drills from the ground, and many more. The armor is one of the only things that takes the ‘sci-fi’ theme Hothead talked about with sets based off Star Wars, Tron, and more. Also, once again money is completely useless since you’ll be rolling in so much cash that buying everything in a shop won’t even put a dent in your wallet.

Co-op is still in the game but for some reason it’s still just local only. You’d think after a year Hothead would’ve added in some online support. They did include all the characters from the previous game along with Roesha, a funky revolver wielding lady, and Bob from Marketing (he’s a shark who shoots lasers from his eyes). I really don’t recommend playing the game with a partner if you want to breeze through the game since for some reason the co-op character takes little to no damage, deals MASSIVE amounts to enemies, and will just make the entire game pretty easy (although I suppose this is alright in some stupidly hard segments). Just as an example of how easy co-op makes the game I’ll give an example. Here was my strategy in both the first boss fight, the multiple yeti fight, and another I can’t recall right now: I simply turned on my second controller, kept Deathspank just barely on the edge of the enemy ‘awareness’ radar, took the second controller (as Bob) and simply spammed his lasers. It took around 2 minutes (maybe less) to kill each of these bosses like this when it would take Deathspank much longer.

The graphics are the same as usual with a mishmash of 2D environments with 3D characters. The environments this time around aren’t as unique as the previous game since the game mostly has 4 major areas with no extra paths to explore. You’ll find *another* desert/mountain are (The Forbidden Zone), another lake, the Leprechan Mafia casino (but this is a small area), and the only notable area being the Forest of Tomorrow which is full of twisted experiments like cloned gummy bears, evil dinosaurs, and killer Christmas trees.

The Final Word
By the end of the day I really wanted to love The Baconing as much as I loved the first game, but I just couldn’t keep playing through the game ignoring the massive sign that said “LAZY LAZY LAZY!”. At least games like Call of Duty add something new; Baconing rips off previous quests, reuses old characters instead of giving us a bigger cast of new ones, has an incredibly lazy map screen, a weird difficulty curve, and for months the devs boasted a ‘sci-fi theme’ for the game when only one *small* area and the weapons/armor had it. I’d only recommend this to people new to the series or people who absolutely loved the previous two entries enough to want a second helping. You could say I’m being a bit hard on the game, but then I guess that old saying “Too much of a good thing can be bad” just really applied to me this time.

– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average