Do you like Bacon? Do you like thongs? Do you like video games? If you do, by all accounts, you should absolutely love The Baconing, the latest title in the XBLA and PSN DeathSpank trilogy of games. Does this game live up to the standards set by the original or should it be left to burn eternally in the Great Bacon Fires? Gaming Shogun has embedded a reporter deep within Spanktopia to answer that question for you in our review.
In Hothead Game’s The Baconing, DeathSpank, the titular hero of… um… DeathSpank, finds himself bored and dons all six of the mighty Thongs of Virtue, the titular thongs of… you get it. This unleashes the powerful AntiSpank, the polar opposite of DeathSpank, causing havoc across all of peaceful Spanktopia.
Just like DeathSpank and The Thongs of Virtue, The Baconing is a rather straightforward action RPG. Playing from an overhead view, much like Diablo and Gauntlet, you are tasked with killing lots of enemies, raiding them of all their loot, and killing more enemies.
The Baconing is a basic, run of the mill loot grinder in its gameplay. Four weapons are equipped to your face buttons and you mash away in an effort to destroy all in your path. Respawn points are set as outhouses in the game so death is never much more than an inconvenience of traveling back to where you were killed. Murder murder murder… Kill everything and kill it often. Get awesome stuff. The gameplay begins and ends there.
The real fun in The Baconing, as with the other two titles in the series, is found in the game’s presentation and writing. The game world seems to roll out from beneath you, as though someone tore out images from a picture book and attached them to a spool. Areas transition seamlessly from one to another, from haunted ghost town to computer world to Vegas strip, and e game really pushes the creativity to be found in the constraints sometimes found within file sizes of downloadable titles.
The humor in this game is spot on, if you’re a fan of non-sequiturs and rambling nonsense. The sense of humor on display is far wackier than anything you’ll find on the market today. From backing up castle sewage to waging genocide for racist aliens, there are no quests quite like what you’ll find in The Baconing… Unless you’ve played the previous two games.
If you’ve played either DeathSpank or The Thongs of Virtue, there’s not much to attract you to this title. It’s all more of the same, which is fine if you’re a hardcore fan or someone new to the series. Outside of that, there’s no real new features or gameplay mechanics to draw older players back to the series. It’s a good way to spend your ten bucks, but if you’ve already played a DeathSpank game I see no real reason to shell out more money for a repeat experience.
