Too Long; Didn't Play: Blood and Bacon

Hi diddley ho, employed gamereenos! It’s time for that most wonderful time of the year when your humble pseudo-critic picks an alliterative theme for the month.

This year I decided to go with a theme that holds up an unsung hero of Gamers With Jobs. He’s generous, he’s kind, and he’s a dad-joker extraordinaire! He knows how to dedicate himself to a joke too. For several weeks he gifted me one avian-themed game after another just to make bird puns.

I can’t help but give it up for a person like that, so welcome to Danopian December, in which I will review only games that were gifted to me by that fowl punster of fowl punsters: Danopian The Manopian.

First up: Blood and Bacon

Sponsored By: Danopian

Time butchered: 45 minutes

Chop Review

Zombie pigs are trying to take over your farm. It's up to you, and a barn full of weapons, to make sausage out of them. Literally, in some cases. [Editor's Note: I'm squinting at you as hard as I can.]

With one level and one enemy type, you'd think this game would be a crashing boar, but Blood and Bacon is surprisingly satisfying, and not just in that “part of this balanced breakfast” way.

Loin Review

The game opens in a barn with a partly dismembered farmer pinned to a wall. He speaks to you very calmly, considering the circumstances, and tells you that something horrible has happened to the pigs of the world, and it’s up to you, as the one in the room who is not literally stapled to a building, to put down the zombie-pig rebellion.

Fortunately, there’s an arsenal hanging on those walls not decorated with the guts of the unfortunate farmer, so you’ve got plenty to work with. The game progresses along your standard FPS-weapon progression, where you start with something weak and earn more powerful weapons as you progress through the levels. Eventually you get to the automatic rifles and everything else becomes irrelevant, but it’s nice to have options.

But the guns aren’t the only way to bring home the bacon. Outside the barn there are traps, such as the electric fence, which will fry up the undead cob rollers if they’re nearby when you throw the switch. The real star, though, is the gigantic sausage grinder in one corner of the map. By kicking the carcasses of your vanquished shoats into the grinder, you earn power-ups. This could be Boar’s Milk, which gives you temporary boosts to speed and agility, or more munitions to use against the invading sausage filler.

Before you ask: No, I don’t know why a sausage grinder can take dead zombie pigs and turn them into ammunition and grenades. Then again, I’ve never seen a real sausage factory, so for all I know that’s where grenades actually come from.

Every ten levels, you are pitted against one gigantic boss pig that can talk, and will berate you until you kill it. Now, I may not know for absolute certain that grenades don’t come from pig guts, but I have been to enough county fairs to know that pigs don’t talk (except to spiders – but that thought makes me sad, so I don’t think it). So maybe this game isn’t suffering from a surfeit of realism. Just sayin’.

Blood and Bacon is a wave-based first-person shooter, which means you get dropped into a level and don’t get to leave until everything but you is dead. There seem to be a lot of these cropping up, probably because they’re easy to make in Unity, but as an honest person I can’t help but notice that the new Doom remake is basically the same thing with more polish, so I won’t complain. It would be like telling your son all the reasons why his Halloween costume doesn’t look very much like the character he’s dressed up as. Why not kick a puppy while you’re at it?

The controls are decent enough to be fun, which is all you can really ask for, and the overall game seems to be devoid of bugs. There’s not all that much else to say about it, so maybe I’ll just wrap with some pig jokes.

What do you call for a sick pig?
A hambulance.

What’s the difference between bird-flu and swine-flu?
For bird flu, you need tweetment. For swine flu, you need oink-ment.

What do you call a pig thief?
A hamburglar.

What happened when the pig pen broke?
They needed to use pig-pencils.

Will I keep playing?

I’ll keep it installed for a while. Steam seems to download an update for it every ten minutes or so, so there’s always work being done on it. Seriously, there have been at least four updates since I started writing this review. For all I know, it could be a cooking game at this point.

Is it tough like an overcooked chop?

Death doesn’t come easily to the main character, and the difficulty curve is nice and gentle. The levels eventually get hard, but it’s that “holy crap there’s too many” kind of hard we remember from the arcade days.

Three butcher blocks out of a possible five. You’d never mistake this game as being in the same challenge class as Devil Daggers, but it’s no walking-sim in the park either.

Comments

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/r2oJWOn.gif)

This one just screamed "Greg Decker" to me from the depths of the weekly Steam sale list. It was all worth it for these boartiful pig puns.

This looks terrible.

Perfect for this series.

People do take time to find inspiration. - Steven C Wyer