Barbearian (Review)

Barbearian is a "fast-paced hack'n'slash with massive battles in a colorful, hand-drawn world." Developed and published by Kimmo Lahtinen. At it's core Barbearian looks to be a Dynasty Warriors type of game with a Cat Quest/Kingdom Rush style of art, And it is. At the start it seems simple and easy enough, (and it is through all of the starting levels.) but ramps up a few hours in. You are a Barbearian (a barbarian wearing a bear skin) who has been hijacked to a strange world and forced to fight for your life, as well as Discover the secrets of the Arbitrators and find your way back home. That's about the whole main plot of the game, there is more you can learn from talking to NPC's, but story isn't really a big attention grabber when playing a hack'n'slash.

Barbearian is played in a top down perspective (sort of) and is packed full to the brim with charming dazzling graphics, the art style (like I mentioned before) is a mix of Cat Quest and Kingdom Rush, meaning everything is beautifully hand-drawn and bright and colorful. The animations are pretty great as well, sending tens to hundreds of baddies flying with your charge-dash is extremely satisfying. I'd also like to mention how good the water looks, even though it's nothing more than a roadblock of sorts since you don't have the ability to swim, good looking water effects are hard to do and I think it's worth acknowledging that they're very well done here. The music is bombastic and hyper which is quite fitting for the pace and style of the game, the sound effects are also very well done but are occasionally drowned out by the loud music. 

At the start of the game you are told you must fight for your life, right before being dropped into the tutorial. After you've completed the basics you are taken to the hub-world, where you will meet a penguin/pelican looking guy. He's basically your guide and statistics keeper, letting you know little things like how many enemies you've slaughtered or how many of your troops have perished. In the hub-world you can use the fruit (loot) you've collected from killing baddies and opening chests to purchase upgrades and buy weapons that will randomly spawn in the levels, you can also talk to NPC's and enter challenges and levels. Levels are presented as rune-like portals, each containing three microlevels. The main goal of each level is to find and kill every enemy captain and while simple at first, later on it gets much more difficult and chaotic. With the additions of crystals that spawn groups of enemies, fort defenses like mortars, multiple captains, much larger hordes, stronger enemy types, etc. There's also a huge boss fight after completing each group of levels, these were usually the most challenging parts of the game (duh). I had some trouble with a few of them, the second boss annoyed me quite a bit, but not to the point of giving up. 

Your primary weapon is an axe that you can use to slash or perform a charge-dash, charging is a special ability that takes a few seconds to cooldown once used, it's very useful and can plow through hordes of enemies with no problem. You also have the ability to become enraged which allows you to throw quick frenzied attacks for a short duration of time, but it takes a long while to charge up. When you first start you'll be slaughtering foes all by yourself, but as you progress you will be able to rescue prisoners and recruit them into your army, these minions are trapped in self-destructing prisons of goo, if you don't manage to smash them open in time you'll have to restart the level before you can try again. As the game gets increasingly harder your minions get increasingly less useful, and start dying pretty much as soon as you place them. When fighting large mobs of hundreds to thousands (might be a bit of an exaggeration) there's no real way to consistently keep your troops from being overwhelmed and killed almost instantly, they degrade from helping hands to dummy targets used to escape sticky situations.

If you don't manage to get out of said situations and end up getting your bear skin handed to you, you'll end up meeting a guy wearing a cloak and what looks like a bandage rapped around his head. He'll basically tell you that he can send you back but it's gonna cost 30% of your fruit, which in my opinion is a steal for resurrection. I think this is the only hack'n'slash game that includes a death penalty I've ever come across. (obviously excluding rogue-likes) The only gripe I have with is that it occasionally gets way to chaotic during a few of the levels in the second half of the game, when there's hundreds of enemies on screen and they're all attacking stuff and there's so many flashing lights and effect going off at the same time it's insane. I think it's pretty safe to say that you shouldn't play this If you have a bad case of epilepsy, maybe the developer will implement something in the future. 

At it's core Barbearian is frantic and a little seizure inducing at times, (though this doesn't stop me from enjoying it) the combat is as satisfying as it is crazy, (rampaging through hoards of skellingtons and other evil creatures is a blast even when it gets overwhelmingly chaotic.) the art style is lovely and the music/sound design is very well done, especially for a one man development team. It's the perfect kind of game to just pick up and enjoy for a few hours at a time. Barbearian is anything and everything you could possibly want from a crazy, bombastic, largescale, hack'n'slash. Barbearian is available for $14.99 on Pc/Steam and IOS.