The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one.
These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why.
Without further ado…
Bardbarian
This week, a really cool game caught our attention called Bardbarian (Free) from Bulkypix and TreeFortress. We’ve commented in the past many times that games which take several different elements of different genres and blend them together can work towards creating a unique and fun experience. Bardbarian does exactly that. You control a warrior by running around an arena, sort of like a dual-stick shooter like Minigore and the like. Except your warrior doesn’t do much attacking himself, rather, he plays music with his “axe" (literally an axe turned into a lute) and that encourages a band of different classes of characters to follow him around and do the fighting for him. It reminds me a lot of how you get a long snake of characters in NimbleQuest, and each class of character has their own set of attacks and special abilities.
Your goal is to fend off waves of enemies who approach from the side of the screen with the intent of destroying your town’s giant crystal. Here, this part of the game plays something like a castle or tower defense game as you try to take out the enemies before they reach the crystal. The various characters who are fighting for you can all be upgraded as can your own warrior and the town you’re fighting in. It creates a mashup of different gameplay styles that just absolutely works, and Bardbarian has that special something that makes it hard to stop playing. There’s a single-player campaign to work through which should keep you busy for quite a while, but then there’s an endless survival mode to ensure you can keep on going with Bardbarian for a long time to come. Definitely check it out, it’s not one you should miss.
