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Bad North Review: Tiny Islands, Massive Tension
Moola Monday: Back to My Youth

Veteran’s Vault: Double-O Behave!
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Razer Deathadder V3 Two Years Later: Still a Sneaky Snek

Cody Nery Thomson·17 February 2025·4 Comments

#TRENDING ON NAG

Silent Hill 2 Endings Explained: A Deep Dive Into James Sunderland's Haunting Journey

Silent Hill 2 Endings Explained: A Deep Dive Into James Sunderland’s Haunting Journey

Here Are Our Favourite Dead Island 2 Skill Card Builds For Every Character

Here Are Our Favourite Dead Island 2 Skill Card Builds For Every Character

Let Verse Decide What Your Bedroom Should Look Like Based on Your Music Taste

Assassin's Creed For Beginners: Which Games To Play First In This Epic, Hooded Saga

Assassin’s Creed For Beginners: Which Games To Play First In This Epic, Hooded Saga

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed Review - Shell Shockingly Bad

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed Review – Shell Shockingly Bad

#WATCH NAG

Bad North is one of those strategy games that manages to be both charming and merciless. Beneath its picturesque islands and minimalist art style lies a tense real-time tactics roguelite where every battle is a desperate fight for survival.

In this game, you are tasked with defending a chain of islands from relentless Viking raiders. You'll command small squads of soldiers, make split-second tactical decisions, and watch carefully laid plans unravel in spectacular fashion.

At first glance, Bad North looks rather simple. The game strips real-time strategy down to its absolute essentials as you command a small number of squads across a chain of procedurally generated islands, defending your people against waves of invaders.

Game reviewed on the Samsung Galaxy A57 5G Smartphone

//ABOUT NAG
Video games, esports, sci-tech, entertainment, pop culture, and a few things in between.
Web: https://www.nag.co.za/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nagcoza
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nagcoza/
discord: https://discord.gg/A875FffCUS

Dark North Review: Tiny Islands, Massive Tension

This week’s Veterans Vault began with a simple plan: talk about games but as it goes, we took a detour through James Bond lore, Sean Connery in The Rock conspiracies, Austin Powers, Nick Cage as Blofeld, and why Idris Elba should probably have been handed the tux years ago. Sorry, we digressed. Again.

Getting back to actual games, I spent some time with Cypher 007 on Apple Arcade, a neat little stealth-action Bond game that understands what mobile gaming should be. It uses a recognisable IP, builds a proper game around it, and doesn’t try to shake you down every five minutes with gacha nonsense. Bond is trapped inside Blofeld’s mind trap, which gives the whole thing a slightly surreal setup while still letting it pull in familiar gadgets, characters, and bits of Bond flavour from across the franchise. It’s more sneaking, stunning guards, and dodging surveillance cones than full murder-suit Bond, but that works nicely on mobile.

From there, James dragged us into the weekly bargains, starting with Resident Evil 5, currently cheap enough to make you wonder why you don’t already own three copies. Control Ultimate Edition also came up, and at that price, it’s basically rude not to buy it. It remains a stone-cold third-person action classic, or as James put it, Stranger Things Jedi. Then there’s Oxygen Not Included, a funny, stressful, survival-management game about keeping stranded little space people alive with food, oxygen, and probably a rising sense of personal failure.

On the top-selling side, we looked at Mina The Hollower, the current indie darling from the Shovel Knight crowd, mixing retro Zelda-style adventure with modern systems and a darker edge. Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! also appeared, which is either a soothing book-sorting game or a pointed reminder that your actual bookshelves are judging you.

City-builder fans should keep an eye on All Will Fail, a physics-based colony sim where your grand designs can literally collapse, while Dome Keeper: The Lost Keepers gives existing fans more of that brilliant mining-by-day, tower-defence-by-night loop. Finally, Morbid Metal brings the flashier end of the show with slick arena combat, character swapping, and the kind of polished action that makes indie games look more expensive than they probably are.

Game of the Week
Cypher 007 (Apple Arcade)

Demo of the week
GrassChopper (Steam)

Game Sales This Week
Resident Evil 5 (Steam)
CONTROL Ultimate Edition (Steam)
Oxygen Not Included (Steam)

Top Selling Games This Week
Mina The Hollower (Steam)
Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! (Steam)
ALL WILL FALL (Steam)
Dome Keeper: The Lost Keepers (Steam)
Morbid Metal (Steam)

It was a packed episode, full of bargains, Bond lore, Steam discoveries, accidental soundtrack education, and the firm editorial position that The Rock is absolutely a Bond movie. Perfect weekend damage, then. Tune in.

We had a tech issue early on, so forgive the weird two-parter here. Part 1 here: https://youtube.com/live/DhyglFrPRsQ

Veteran's Vault: Double-O behave! Part 2

This week’s Veterans Vault began with a simple plan: talk about games but as it goes, we took a detour through James Bond lore, Sean Connery in The Rock conspiracies, Austin Powers, Nick Cage as Blofeld, and why Idris Elba should probably have been handed the tux years ago. Sorry, we digressed. Again.

Getting back to actual games, I spent some time with Cypher 007 on Apple Arcade, a neat little stealth-action Bond game that understands what mobile gaming should be. It uses a recognisable IP, builds a proper game around it, and doesn’t try to shake you down every five minutes with gacha nonsense. Bond is trapped inside Blofeld’s mind trap, which gives the whole thing a slightly surreal setup while still letting it pull in familiar gadgets, characters, and bits of Bond flavour from across the franchise. It’s more sneaking, stunning guards, and dodging surveillance cones than full murder-suit Bond, but that works nicely on mobile.

From there, James dragged us into the weekly bargains, starting with Resident Evil 5, currently cheap enough to make you wonder why you don’t already own three copies. Control Ultimate Edition also came up, and at that price, it’s basically rude not to buy it. It remains a stone-cold third-person action classic, or as James put it, Stranger Things Jedi. Then there’s Oxygen Not Included, a funny, stressful, survival-management game about keeping stranded little space people alive with food, oxygen, and probably a rising sense of personal failure.

On the top-selling side, we looked at Mina The Hollower, the current indie darling from the Shovel Knight crowd, mixing retro Zelda-style adventure with modern systems and a darker edge. Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! also appeared, which is either a soothing book-sorting game or a pointed reminder that your actual bookshelves are judging you.

City-builder fans should keep an eye on All Will Fail, a physics-based colony sim where your grand designs can literally collapse, while Dome Keeper: The Lost Keepers gives existing fans more of that brilliant mining-by-day, tower-defence-by-night loop. Finally, Morbid Metal brings the flashier end of the show with slick arena combat, character swapping, and the kind of polished action that makes indie games look more expensive than they probably are.

Game of the Week
Cypher 007 (Apple Arcade)

Demo of the week
GrassChopper (Steam)

Game Sales This Week
Resident Evil 5 (Steam)
CONTROL Ultimate Edition (Steam)
Oxygen Not Included (Steam)

Top Selling Games This Week
Mina The Hollower (Steam)
Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! (Steam)
ALL WILL FALL (Steam)
Dome Keeper: The Lost Keepers (Steam)
Morbid Metal (Steam)

It was a packed episode, full of bargains, Bond lore, Steam discoveries, accidental soundtrack education, and the firm editorial position that The Rock is absolutely a Bond movie. Perfect weekend damage, then. Tune in.

We had a tech issue early on, so forgive the weird two-parter here. Part 2 here: https://youtube.com/live/zyMQHx5cZJM

Veteran's Vault: Double-O behave! Part 1

In this week’s podcast, the NAG Gear team dig deep into the new BYD Atto 2 DM-I, and they discuss the full Amazon Luna experience, if you are lucky enough to have access to it. Tune in.

NAG Podcast #47 is out now!

Join us for another NAG Podcast with the team, we go LIVE every Thursday at 3pm. Anything goes and the points don’t matter. Join us in the chat and be a part of the show.

//ABOUT NAG
Video games, esports, sci-tech, entertainment, pop culture, and a few things in between.
Web: https://www.nag.co.za/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nagcoza
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nagcoza/
discord: https://discord.gg/A875FffCUS

The NAG LIVE Podcast #47: BYD and Amazon Luna is in the house

It looks like we're in for another RAM and SSD price hike later this year. Check out the full interview with Chris House on NAG.co.za.

RAM and SSD Prices Skyrocket. Could it Double by Year End?

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