The Baconing

Is The Baconing a bad game? No, certainly not. All qualms need to be taken with a huge grain of salt anyway, since this game isn’t meant to be clever. With its cartoon-like presence and execution, grinding towards another saved universe and collecting loot still looks and feels fun. Every downside seems to have a slight redeeming factor, which makes up for a lot. It’s just very unfortunate that the game never seems to pick up and therefore leaves a craving for more.

When deciding whether or not to pick up The Baconing you should consider how you felt about Thongs of Virtue. If all you want to do is play more DeathSpank, then this will certainly do the trick. For me, once was apparently enough. If you’re a DeathSpank virgin and like loot-based hack ‘n slash games, give The Baconing a try before you buy.

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 ...

The tweaks to the combat make it a much more challenging affair, detracting from the franchise's strengths. But fans of the previous DeathSpank games will at least enjoy the game's writing and dialogue which, while not for everyone, is top-notch as usual.

The Baconing likes to poke fun at itself- the tedious nature of its fetch quests, the ease with which Spank can be resuscitated at an outhouse- but this just highlights its flaws and doesn’t justify their existence. Any developer who is intelligent enough to recognise the stagnant conventions of the genre is intelligent enough to create something better. The Baconing sags limply in a puddle of its own stale grease when it should sizzle: reheated leftovers from the previous two games, libera...