I'd heard about the development of this game for some time, but other than thinking the title was a work of genius, I never paid much attention to the actual gameplay whenever it surfaced in the news, so I went into the game rather blind upon a first go. After sitting down with the game, however, I found myself really enjoying this quirky amalgamation of all things gaming, geek, and genre related. If a solid puzzle game/sim mixed with top-notch humor and excellent writing is what you're after, you'll find a gem of a deal when it comes to Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman!

The Overlord has summoned you – the great god of destruction – to help him with his troubles. You see, Overlord wants to rule the world, but he went and planted his base right within the local kingdom, and now heroes of all shapes, sizes, and expertise are on their way to try and destroy the evil and save the world. As an evil god hell bent on getting the Overlord to succeed in his mission, it's your job to build a dungeon worthy of your power, but also one that can most importantly protect your Overlord from being dragged out into the sun and killed.

Look At All The Magic

The game has a fairly robust training mode, which I'd not only recommend to play so you have an idea what to do, but the writing of the situations is just as solid as it is throughout the game. You'll be tasked with raising enough slimes, raising some flying bug minions, and so on and son on, working your way through several chapters before you're good and ready to give the story mode a go.

In the story mode, you play as the Overlord's god, digging him out a dungeon one brick at a time to hopefully keep him safe from the heroes on their way to grab him. The game starts off easy enough with the early heroes, as mere slimes and bugs can kill them, but later on you'll run across heroes with healing or buff powers, and you'll need to have an upgraded army if you hope to make it through to the next challenge.

Rather than being presented a series of levels in a row with clean restarts, playing the story mode has you constantly using and tweaking the dungeon you first started. The heart of every dungeon is the slime mosses, which walk around and spread nutrients, which can not only spawn more slimes, but can create bugs and even lizard men if you let enough nutrients built-up before shattering them with your pick. The thing you have to watch for is the ecology of the system, as bugs will eat the slimes, which you need, but the lizard men eat the bugs, which they need to lay eggs and multiply. As you can see, it's a very complicated and challenging game, as you need to keep a proper balance within your ecosystem so that everything gets what they need without being driven to extinction.

You'll suck in the beginning, but as you learn the ropes and learn from your mistakes, you'll find yourself building better and better dungeons. You'll also start learning new tips and tricks by partaking in all of the game's training modes, such as learning about how to create monster summoning runes, how to power those runs, and the type of paths that should be created to maximize your evil killing potential. You'll start to learn about what enemies work best for what heroes, such as later heroes only taking a lot of damage from evil mystical dolls; learning to create and harness the dolls, however, is tricky and hard to master. Besides slimes, bugs, lizard men, and evil dolls, there's also roaming skeletons (can be powered up by roaming spirits), flowers, and dragons of various level strengths.

After a successful defense of an oncoming hero, the game will reward you for the amount of creatures left and how much dig power you didn't use. You can then use that dig power to upgrade all of your troops in the game, so that anytime a new one spawns it will be of that set and with different strengths. For instance, a lizard man mage is much more powerful than a regular lizard man.

Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman feels like a rather short game, even though I've yet to beat the main quest or unlock all of the challenges. The story mode must be completed in one sitting from beginning to end. Challenges are quicker tasks that have you trying to complete goal specific actions such as raising 20 lizard men in under ten minutes or being able to beat a certain hero who has become more powerful. The story repeats the same over and over, but it's nice to read new things as you advance further than you have ever before. As for the challenges, they're really great, and not only give you a tough task to test your skills at, but they also help you be a better player for when tackling the story mode.
Lizards Attack

Graphically the game is old school all the way, but that's what I really dig about the game's charm. The Overlord and all his minions you create are nothing more than a bunch of NES (at best) pixels and sprites roaming around a board that looks like the kind Dig Dug would've used if they lived in a fantasy realm with dragons and kings and queens. Despite the simplicity, it's still easy for the most part to look at an object and know exactly what it is; coloring helps a long way in establishing various level ranks. The sound work is equally old school, as slithers, chomps, and bones rattling all have one sound spread amongst them, and the background music is a medieval MIDI anthem that I thought was catchy, but it does recycle, and I was told at least once to turn it down since it was annoying them so bad.

Though the gameplay is this solid amalgamation of puzzle game meets Sim City meets god game genre – the thing that made me fall in love was the writing and numerous jokes that nerds everywhere will pick-up on and laugh out loud at. Some of the humor comes from the training, challenges, and story mode, but you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you don't read each and every entry in the almanac. Yes, laugh at The Biggest Little Loser Chimli (a Biggest Loser and LOTRO reference all rolled into one) when he's set to invade your dungeon, but other jokes come by way of plants that should've had after school activities, references to a Brain Bug (Starship Troopers), Facehuggers and headcrabs (Aliens and Half-Life), jokes about a fly's poker skills, collectible card games, a fighter who has learned the craft from watching anime and reading manga, and there's even a hero who gets spiky blonde hair when he gets fired up (obvious Super Saiyan Dragonball Z reference). It's just real fun to read entries like these and just laugh, and it's all done so well you can tell the game was put together by a bunch of otaku fans that really felt a special connection for the game.

Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman is currently the only PSP game I'm playing at the moment and it's the one that finally made me blow the dust off of it and give it a charge. There's overall game packages out there better than this, but there's just something about the charm, humor, and solid challenging gameplay that keeps me coming back for more. I'd definitely recommend every PSP owner give at least the trial a download before making up your mind up one way or another. With a game price of $19.99 – Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman seems like a great deal to me and easily worth the purchase price.

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