The Baconing

Recommend

Game is pretty disappointing. The humour is hit or miss due it's age, but overall, still okay. However, the game is quite boring. Mechanics are pretty much the same from the last iteration and enemies, locations and themes seem to be ripped out of prior entries. The game is poorly optimised with crashes occurring right after an ALT + TAB, V-sync still causing issues and needing to be disabled, and random crashes. Lots of instances where the MC gets stuck on objects (more so than previous titles) including an instance where an NPC had to walk to an object during an in game cutscene only to get caught on the terrain and forcing me to kill the app. Really poor hitboxes are still prevalent, but enemies hit much harder than prior entries. Walk speed seems to be slower than before as well, and you do a lot of walking so spamming speed potions is a thing. Oh, and for 100% achievement completion, you need 2 run throughs due to unlockable difficulty. Luckily, this also seems to be the shortest entry, but still, an entry not needed. An an aside, currently quite annoyed that while fighting the second to last boss, the game crashed and now the save file is corrupted. And, due to the file save being in .gg format, I am unable to edit the save to remedy the errors. So, I am now stuck doing 3 playthroughs...

The main selling point is the humor, but that's very subjective and ymmv. The actual gameplay is kinda terrible, so I can't really recommend it as a game in of itself. The gameplay is just a very lightweight action-adventure of the style of Diablo or Titan Quest, but without the depth or character building that make those so good. Instead, it's replaced with a melee build with a mostly non-working shield who only attacks enemies you explicitly click on (while the rest of the horde murders you). In other words, there's no auto-attacking at all, so you just sit there spam clicking and trying to shield until you probably die anyway, and then have to walk back to where you died. Death feels cheap, but rather than this feeling kind of like a superpower, it instead just feels like a nuisance. Really, the comedy is the whole selling point of the game. Some obviously love it, as the positive reviews show. For me, well... The first time I played it, I recall really enjoying it. It's a very irreverent sort of humor with a egotistical a**hole hero as the main character. My most recent attempt at playing it, though... The humor just felt rather stale. I think the problem might be that this sort of parody hero has been done to death at this point, deconstructed and reconstructed, and so it's lost a lot of the originality that existed when it first came out. Not as relevant to me personally, but the graphics are also pretty rough. This is pretty unsurprising given the age of the game, and a lot of the backgrounds still hold up pretty well, but this then clashes with the mobs that look like something out of early World of Warcraft, still more polygon than mesh. So should you get this? Eh. It's pretty cheap, but the game play is lousy. Really, it all depends on whether the humor clicks for you or not - as well as whether you're willing to throw yourself against waves of enemies over and over to finish an area and move to the next. Personally, I would skip this and go for another game unless you already know you're a fan of the humor - such as playing previous Deathspank games or watching a let's play or something.

The Baconing is a solid but slightly disappointing conclusion to the DeathSpank trilogy — the humor and voice acting are still genuinely funny, and the colorful art style holds up, but without Ron Gilbert at the helm the wit feels a step below the first two games. The hack-and-slash combat gets frustrating fast, especially with offscreen ranged enemies pelting you with homing projectiles on top of a cooldown-heavy shield system that punishes any lapse in timing. That said, I clocked around 8-9 hours doing everything, which felt fair for the price, and the variety of environments kept things from going completely stale. If you've played and enjoyed the first two games, it's worth finishing the trilogy — just go in with tempered expectations and back up your saves often.

cant get it to work on steam deck

Not working with two controllers, local multiplayer with big picture not works because you need keyboard and mouse

2011 played this game cause I love the other two that were made. 2023 Playing it again because I still enjoy playing this game HotHead Games Need to make more of them it's 2023 FFS.