I have been playing through the new Deathspank title, The Baconing. It is based on a true-ish story. So getting into the game you are met with an intro video explaining a little about the story, basically you will be playing as Deathspank, who would of thought, so he had been busy vanquishing every bad guy he could find. He soon becomes extremely bored as he has nothing to do, and one day he decides to put all of the Thongs of Virtue all at once, which for some reason summons a giant evil version of Deathspank named the 'Anti-Spank'. To defeat the Anti-Spank, Death Spank must burn each of the Thongs of Virtue in Bacon Fire.
You see the return of many npc's such as the Wise Cow and the Thongolith Researcher who you come across pretty early on. As the game progresses you meet a number of other people you met in previous games, I'll get into that a little later on. Anyway you get a choice of 3 level difficulties to start easy, normal and hard. There is also an insane difficulty which is unlockable once you complete the game. You can also change difficulties on the fly dropping it down to easy when your stuck or keep dying and knocking it back up whenever you like.
Starting the game it throws you start into action, within a few seconds into the game you get ambushed by a load of Cyborques (Anti Spanks minions), getting you immediately used to the controls which are easy enough to pick up, be it keyboard and mouse or xbox controller, they are both quite simple and easy to pick up. I personally prefer keyboard and mouse controls, first of due to the more accurate aiming of your weapons, along with the fact I played the past two Deathspank games with these control so I'm used to them. I did have a shot with my controller and they are fine and just as easy, it's all preference at the end of the day.
Like the previous games a lot of features have made a come back, such as the outhouse save system. The choice to have 4 weapons and 4 items which are all easily changed. Though weapon wise I tend to just use two, some sort of melee weapon and a crossbow/gun. You still get strange quests, the first perticularly weird one I came across was one I got from an orphan where I had to go rescue said orphans teddy from ghosts. After a few quests you unlock a gate leading you to the first boss, 'The Mineorque', which is really quite difficult, even after I switched down from Hard to Normal. He is some dude with a drill on his head, he uses drills to attack you from underground if you get to far away from him and a flame thrower if you get close to him, while trying to kill him he also has minions to keep you occupied as well which kept killing me just as I started to get some offence on the go.
The game definately has got that Deathspank feel to it from the music to the verbal abuse of orphans to the terrible yet somehow fitting voice acting. On you go with the story and you come along to Z.I.M.O.N's place which leads to the first bacon fire. Before you go inside you have to cross a set of bridges turned into puzzle where you have to flick switches in a certain order to get across to go get a door code. This took me quite a while to do this as you have to use a combination of of flicking switches and positioning yourself with outhouses. So you get go into the house of Z.I.M.O.N, which has a very Tron looking enviroment, so you meet him and must complete a game of Simon says before he will let you through to the first of the Bacon Fires where you burn your first Thong of Virtue, doing so extinguishes the Bacon Fire opening up a path with leads to the next area 'The Forest of Tomorrow'.
You come across a couple more folk from previous games now, this time it's Ima Applehole and her husband Strunken, who marriage you happened to ruin in the last game, now you have to make a clone of the husband to help out Ima as Strunken is happy being single and doesn't want to go back to her. To get towards the second Bacon Fire you have to reunite a radioactive family. So after talking to the mother of this strange family, she tells you the rest of the family is late for dinner, so off you go hunting down the rest of the family, you find the dad up at the robot brothel, and have to kill a load of robot hookers before he will return for dinner. You then have to get the son, whose hanging about by the cloning facility to come back but he won't return until he gets a dog to play with, which you get after making a clone of Ima's husband, she gives you her two headed dog as a reward. Then you go after the daughter, who has artificially created a boyfriend and is out in the middle of no where, so you go along and kill this robot boyfriend, pissing her off and she storms off home. So you go back to get your reward for getting the family back for dinner, then they all start arguing and blow up, which they seem to do when they get annoyed, and knock out the wall behind them leading to the second Bacon Fire.
The third Bacon Fire is at a casino in 'Rainbow Way' which is run by the Leprechaun McMafia. If you think Godfather mixed with everything stereotypically Irish. So you have to gain the trust of the Godfather of the McMafia and do random quests for him one of which you have to go kill 'Anti-gambling' Monks and Nuns and blow up their bus. After this you still need to need to do some quests to get some Elvis styled armour such as saving some miners trapped in a cave in, but it turns out they trapped themselves in so they can get a longer coffee break, its quite funny. After getting the right armour you past the god father, where you will compete in 'Ultimate Opera Championship' which is where you encounter your next boss. Which is a conductor, which takes some beating, who has a load of minions to fight along side of in form of musicians and opera singers.
After beating the last boss and burning another of the Thongs, you head through a sewer and end up at Barnacle Lake, where mind sucking barnacles seem to be taking over a lot of the folk round here. So here you meet Captain Taint, who you got a ship off of in Thongs of Virtue, the same ship that you will commandeer once again in this game. So after talking to a barnacled Taint you ask him for the keys to his boat and does willingly and you also get a quest from the barnacle that's controlling him to save the Mother Barnacle that is trapped in the Cyborque fortress, so after sailing around doing a number of quests, which you did round about this far though the game in the last game aswell. After a progression of quests it takes you to the Cyborque Fortress, so on you go fighting a number of enemies getting further into the fortress, once everything is killed you find the mother barnacle, which you have now freed due to the killing of everyone. So it tells you the way to the next Bacon Fire which is not far at all and just down a path ahead of you. This now leads you onto the next area, Valhalla Heights a retirement home for gods after people have stopped worshipping.
At Valhalla Heights the main quest line is how Emilio, God of Orphans, has been murdered, a title you will become after doing some chores for Zeus, who along with Thor are both suspects in Emilio's murder. Both of which deny doing it, as Zeus is to old and decrepit to do such things, and Thor was busy playing golf. While on this quest to find out who did it, you come across another familiar face, Rich Cabin, from the previous game, this time he is working in real estate, but is doing it quite shadily by evicting Gods from there homes so he can sell them on and make himself richer. First you have to evict Ganesha, a big elephant god who is looking pretty swanky, with his shades and tracksuits and jewellery, anyway you have to get him out his yard with a trail of peanuts. Then you go after Anansi, a spider who sounds very much like Bill Cosby, I spent ages talking to him purely for his voice, to get him out his yard all you need is some bug spray from the golf shop. And finally you have to evict Elvis, where you get him to give you an autograph of draft papers, which you get in Hell's half acre, you then show him the papers and inform him he must go to war, he leaves completing your last eviction quest. Anyway back to the storyline. After you find out Thor and Zeus are not behind the Murder of Emilio, the Sheriff of Gods (who you got the murder quest from originally, I forgot to mention earlier but cba to go back and find where I should of put it in so it's staying here) finds some new evidence pointing blame towards the Midgard Serpent. This is the point where you head down to Hell's Half Acre heading for the Midgard Serpent, but first you must help Hades who has been imprisoned by said Serpent, Hades will only tell you where the final Bacon Fire is if you release him, and to do so you must sacrifice a number of enemies, by killing them in the sacrificial circle. So you get past this burning the final Thong of Virtue and meet the next to last boss, who believe it or not is immortal. So you kill him a few times and eventually he gets bored and just leave, you still count this as a victory and complete your quest of killing the Midgard Serpent also with the little minions that appear after each time you kill him there is a weapon lying on the floor you have to pick up to kill them with. On you go and escape from hell to a nice grassy area, which has a few boarded up entrances with 'DLC under construction' signs over them. So whether they are infact going to make some dlc for the game or if it's just a gag about the ridiculous amount of dlc in the world today, but I'll not get into a rant about that just now.
So you wander through this small open area and come across the final outhouse, you should get an achievement here so long as you found every other outhouse in the game, next to this outhouse there is a tunnel that goes WAY down. Really that's what it says when you scroll over it. This leads to eventually to a little arena type area where you will fight the Anti-Spank. He is really quite nasty. You have to kill both of his arms and his torso, all of which have individual health. I found it easier to kill the arms first from a distance with my orphan gun then go full force on the torso, while full up to the nose with potions and invulnerability orbs. I looked up strategy guides to killing him as I died the first few times. So now you have rid the world of the Anti-Spank you get your outro video, where you find out the Anti Spank was making a time machine and now enters references to Back to the Future, and leaves you with some what of a cliffhanger ending blatantly put in there to leave an opening for another adventure with Deathspank some point down the line.
Now I have pretty much done a run down of the entire story of the game, my thoughts on it. If you like the previous Deathspank games, you will no doubt like this one. If you haven't played though before but do like hack and slash RPG's and random humour I suggest you give it a shot aswell. For a tenner you can't go wrong with this game at that price, I played through the game, it took me what over ten hours to finish it. There's some 'big' titles out there that don't last that long. It's a fun little game and well worth the money, keeping me amused all the way through it.
