Genre : Strategy
Developer: NinjaBee
Players: 1-8
Retail Price: $10
Availability: Xbox 360
Somehow, Ninjabee’s third offering on the Xbox 360 had slipped past my radar. I can’t really explain it, but beyond knowing ‘the Outpost Kaloki guys made another game’ I was woefully ignorant of Band of Bugs. I was happy, then, when they announced new content for the game and gave me a reason to go back to it (our coverage of the new DLC Kaloki Adventures should be coming next week).
It turns out that Band of Bugs is a turn-based tactical game played on a grid that I might compare to Final Fantasy Tactics if I had played more than five minutes of the latter. Different types of bugs act as different classes, and so you have archers, mages, big burly types and so on. Unlike Advance Wars, the only other turn based strategy game I’ve really played, the turns are not ‘Team A’ then ‘Team B.’ Instead, your moves are interspersed, so it would go A, B, A, B, A, A, etc. The more you weed out your opponents the less you have to wait between character moves, so even when your objectives are to get to the end of the level or kill a specific enemy it’s still in your best interests to cause general havoc.
The game’s story mode has you play as Maal, the standard young-warrior-who-must-become-a-leader. In the middle of your training you’re called away to help defend your kingdom, and are taken through a story that’s entertaining and unobtrusive enough to allow you to enjoy the various scenarios but doesn’t offer too much in the way of literary stimulation. There are bad guys, and you eventually find them, and then you have to kill them and stop their evil plans. A Ninja Bee is briefly a playable character, but instead of being the overpowered behemoth that you’d expect as the developer’s playable mascot, I actually thought it was the most useless character in my party. You always have yourself, your archer and your healer and other characters drop in and out periodically.
Maal is by far the main character of the campaign: some levels have the win condition of ‘no one can die’ but all require Maal to survive. He also has by far the most amount of health and, with the exception of the barbarian you have towards the end, is the best at dealing out the pain. This is neither criticism nor acclaim, just a note for players to plan accordingly and know that he can be a bit of a tank and rush into the middle of enemies as long as he can be healed from afar. One mission requires you either kill all the enemies or get Maal to the end, and after a few unsuccessful attempts to take on the world I cast Haste on him and allowed everyone else to die. I got a Bronze on the level, but I also beat it.
Part of the story revolves around ‘jellies,’ which are applied to eggs before they hatch to decide what kind of bug will hatch — except, of course, for Maal, who hatched with no jelly and is the abnormal quasi-chosen-one. As this mechanic was introduced fairly early, I assumed somewhere through the course of the campaign I’d find an egg and be able to choose what kind of bug I would add to my party (I’d have chosen a second archer, since I’m passive aggressive). Regrettably this never happens, and the jellies instead are only used in the context of the main story.
In addition to the premium DLC, NinjaBee added a free update that allows you to play with your avatar in the main campaign and the Spider Hunter multiplayer. By default both will be set to ‘on,’ but you can change this in the main settings menu (but not the in-game settings menu, as I initially tried). Seeing my bekhakied virtual representation in Spider Hunter was sort of cool, but in the campaign it was not only out of place but also didn’t function as well as Maal: characters are grayed out after they take their turn for the round, but my avatar was always full color, leading me to believe that Sigafoos could take as many turns as he damn well pleased, which was unfortunately not the case (but dude, I have a goatee. Come on.)
Regrettably, Band of Bugs suffers from the short attention span of 360 players, and even after the new DLC to reinvigorate it doesn’t seem to have much of an online following. As such, I was only able to convince Dave to jump online with me, and two player multiplayer was fairly underwhelming. I can imagine Spider Hunter being entertaining with a full eight players, but with two the kill-as-many-as-you-can game was more of a slow moving campaign level, since you only have one person on your team. If you have a group of friends interested in the game, though, the free and premium DLC packs combined with a map editor should provide a good amount of entertainment.
That’s really what it comes down to: if you’re part of a turn based circle of friends then there’s more than enough bang for your buck. Even if you roll solo, though, there’s a lot of content for you to explore, even beyond the main campaign. The game isn’t revolutionary, and can suffer from inconsistent difficulty from level to level, but it certainly itched my urge to set up pincer formations. And also to kill spiders. I hate those eight legged bastards.
