Mr. Torgue had better guitar solos.

Barbarian has a great name, and a great concept: hyperactive tower defense. While tower defense games with real-time avatars have become somewhat common, Bardbarian takes this concept a step further and puts the towers themselves around the player. Like Defender's Quest without the paralysis schtick. Running around, dodging attacks, assembling and upgrading a small traveling army to fend off attackers. Great idea!

Unfortunately the game falls prey to some severe execution errors fairly early on. All enemy attacks are ranged, which adds some bullet-hell dodging gameplay; but hireling defenders only loosely follow the bard-barian avatar, making it unreasonably difficult to protect them. Although they can level-up and become stronger, these hirelings rarely recover any health; when they fall in battle, their weaker, base-level replacements will inevitably follow them into the grave soon after. And since upgrades are only available inbetween attempts (in rogue-lite fashion), the net effect is that, as soon as the game begins, there is a statistical wall that current upgrade levels won't be able to overcome.

Perhaps the game's biggest blunder, though, is how it balances this difficulty. Loading-screen hints outright advertise that income-increasing upgrades should come first -- but even with those, meaningfully augmenting the defending army's power takes an inordinate amount of money. Upgrading unit types only goes so far, since each type has built-in weaknesses; upgrading the maximum army size is insufficient, without also upgrading the resource income that allows hiring more units; and with all that done, if an enemy gets to the defensive structure at the end, or even to the bard himself, without more upgrades it will only take a few hits to end the game. It took me more than half an hour of grinding through easy enemy waves, just to afford enough upgrades to get one wave farther than I had from the beginning.

Also, the game's single music track gets pretty old pretty fast. I'm ... glad to be rid of it.

It's still a good idea, and I did have fun with it for a while. But making real progress in Bardbarian is too much grinding and toiling, with too little payoff.

Better than: Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim
Not as good as: Kingdom Rush, Brütal Legend
Of all my complaints about Bardbarian: the anemic soundtrack still baffles and disappoints me most.

Progress: 8/20 waves.