Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands Review

Getting a crowdfunded webcomic on the Nintendo Switch was a long road full of delays. Here is your review with the game title naturally integrated into several spots to increase its frequency without changing your sentence structure or paragraph breaks: Kickstarter games have certainly had their share of bad press, especially after a few high-profile projects that missed the mark.

But in reality, there are a lot of amazing games that come out of crowdfunding when things actually work out. The journey of  Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands is a great example of an indie game surviving the chaotic waters of development. Emerging from the world of popular webcomics, the creator brought their distinct humor and visual identity into an interactive medium.

Like many indie projects hit by the massive delays around 2020, this game took quite a long time to reach the finish line. For first-time developers, transitioning from drawing panel-by-panel comics to coding a complex RPG is a massive hurdle.

When Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands finally landed on the Nintendo Switch, it proved that the extra time in the oven was well worth the wait. It wasn't just a basic port or a quick remaster of an old property, but a fully completed standalone experience.

The story kicks off with a struggling local band entering a tournament that is literally to the death.

The main story follows a local three-piece band called Deathbulge, consisting of high-energy guitarist Faye, chill skeleton bassist Ian, and reliable drummer Briff. They decide to enter a local Battle of the Bands competition, hoping for their big break. The only problem is that they quickly discover a massive, terrifying catch.

This is no ordinary community talent show, and they discover it’s run by a magical contract that allows bands to use the power of their music to attack one another. Trapped in a literal battle to the death, the story becomes a hilarious, bizarre quest to find a legal loophole and escape the contract alive. The writing is easily one of the biggest strengths of Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands, as the humor is sharp, absurd, and incredibly engaging.

The world-building takes you to some utterly ridiculous locales, like a surreal forest where absolutely everything from the trees to the snakes is made of muscular arms. You also explore the literal hair of a giant living tree that has become a chaotic home for local birds.

You will find yourself diving into an underground recording studio run by an orchestra of fish, crowd-surfing through a metal concert, and traveling on a 30-decker bus while hunting ghosts for a free ride. There are tons of clever nods for long-time readers of the comic, including familiar character cameos and the running gag where you kick down every single door you see.

While the narrative is incredibly strong for most of the runtime, the final acts stumble a bit. The pacing changes as you get close to the end, and a harsh difficulty spike hits you out of nowhere right before the climax.

You get to explore maze-like levels and completely change your character classes using musical mods.

Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands plays like a classic top-down RPG, with its own quirks when not in combat. The world maps and individual areas are designed like mazes, rewarding players who explore for items, side quests, and shops.

This maze-like design can, however, at times, become a little confusing and cross over into frustration. Certain environments, such as the late-game concert level, are notoriously difficult to navigate because they lack clear visual landmarks.

Outside of exploring these winding zones, the core loop of this game revolves around an exceptionally deep and rewarding character customization system. Your active party is strictly locked to the core trio of Faye, Ian, and Briff for the entire game, so you won't be recruiting a massive roster.

Instead, the developers injected variety through a robust equipment system that completely alters how each character functions. You can fully customize your party’s attacks and stats by purchasing gear from shops or receiving side quest rewards.

The game features several distinct character classes like the Showoff, Well Toned, Tuner, Distorter, Goth, and Sampler. Rather than picking a permanent class at a level-up screen, your archetype is determined by whatever ability you equip in your primary mod slot.

This allows for unparalleled experimentation, as most classes offer one basic attack and three special abilities that cost a resource called Hype. The Sampler class stands out as a brilliant twist because it flips the rules, trading away high-powered Hype skills for three basic attacks and the ability to strike twice in a single turn.

The combat replaces traditional turns with a fast-paced loading bar where speed is absolutely king.

Battles in Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands are an incredibly inventive variation of the traditional turn-based system. The game completely does away with annoying random encounters, meaning all enemies are fully visible on the overworld screen so you can try to dodge around them.

Once a battle begins, you are presented with a dynamic, moving timeline bar where icons representing your party and the enemies slide across like a loading bar. When an icon reaches the far end of the gauge, that character gets to take their turn immediately.

Because different classes and status effects dictate how fast your icon moves, building for high speed allows you to lap sluggish opponents and attack multiple times before they can even react. The defining tactical layer of this system involves placing items called measures directly onto the timeline tracks.

Measures act as physical modifiers, letting you drop positive buffs onto your own timeline like speed boosts or healing-over-time patches while dropping negative debuffs onto the enemy's track to slow them down or set off countdown bombs.

To use your best abilities, you have to manage your Hype, which continuously regenerates throughout the fight based on your party's positioning. During battle, you choose one band member to stand at the absolute front of the group to act as your primary tank and absorb incoming fire.

Meanwhile, the two backup band members waiting in the wings regenerate their Hype reservoirs at an accelerated rate. This creates a fun gameplay loop where you can let a fast, fragile character like Faye rush through the timeline to deal damage, and then instantly swap a tankier character to the front line before the enemy strikes.

Some of the late-game mechanics and weird difficulty spikes can get pretty annoying.

Despite the brilliance of the combat loop, Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands does suffer from a few mechanical flaws that can bog down the experience. The most frustrating element introduced in the latter half of the game is the Hype Drain, an enemy status effect.

This brutal mechanic completely saps your skill resources, and the game frustratingly deprives you of any viable counter-strategies to mitigate it until after you finish the area where it's used the most. Furthermore, this game abruptly shifts its core combat rules when you participate in official Battle of the Bands matches near the end of the story.

In ordinary encounters, you fight a cluster of enemies with independent health bars, allowing you to use area-of-effect spells to damage the entire group simultaneously. In official band battles, the enemy team adopts your exact layout, forming a frontline where only the active lead character can take damage.

If you use a multi-target attack during these specific duels, the benched enemies take virtually zero damage, turning these fights into tedious wars of attrition. Compounding this issue is a strange balancing quirk where the very first major band fight you encounter is arguably the hardest wall in the entire game, shockingly overshadowing the final boss.

Gaining levels doesn't actually make you feel that much stronger in the grand scheme of things.

When you successfully win a battle, your party is rewarded with standard experience points and currency to spend at the local shops. While the progression system follows standard RPG expectations where you fill a bar to level up and increase your stats, the actual execution in Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands feels a bit underwhelming.

The game features a hard level cap of level 20, which means every single level advancement represents a significant portion of your character's total growth potential. Unfortunately, individual level-ups do not provide a noticeable power spike.

Gaining a level rarely changes the tide of a difficult area, and your characters can still feel relatively weak against local mobs even after grinding out multiple levels back-to-back. The tangible sense of progression and power scaling doesn’t actually come from your base character level, but rather from the quality of the mods you equip.

Because base stats scale so marginally with experience, grinding for raw levels becomes a secondary priority compared to hunting down overpowered skill combinations. Uncovering a powerful defensive mod like the Slap of Protection does way more to trivialize the brutal late-game challenges of Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands than spending hours grinding out experience points ever could.

The art style does a fantastic job of bringing a webcomic directly to life.

Visually, it is a stellar translation of the creator's signature artistic style into a fully interactive medium. The unique webcomic style is kept and doesn't come off as a cheap, generic indie game. The world is packed with eye-catching line work, colorful character designs, and a lively, vibrant color palette that perfectly fits the comedic tone. The developers have gone that extra mile to improve the combat animations, ensuring every instrument strum and comedic reaction looks smooth and fluid.

The visual humor lands beautifully, making the act of simply exploring new towns and looking at NPC designs an absolute joy. Most characters have crazy, over-the-top hair that fits their personalities perfectly, such as Faye's guitar-shaped hair.

The soundtrack is easily one of the best parts of the entire package.

Since the whole game is about a deadly musical tournament, the audio design had to be top-notch, and the team absolutely nailed it. The Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands soundtrack is a masterclass in indie game scoring. It’s a wide variety of high-energy tracks that fit the rock-and-roll vibe of the story well. The different areas you visit all have a great atmosphere to help set the mood. 

The game really comes alive once combat starts, with battle themes that are incredibly catchy, driving, and complex. This makes sure that you never get bored of the music, even when you’re stuck in a long, strategic fight with a tough boss. The sound effects are just as punchy, with every musical blast, bass drop, and comedic slap carrying a satisfying heft, making the audio a definite highlight.

You do need to be aware of constant game crashes on the Nintendo Switch version.

While this game is an absolute triumph in its core design, artistic direction, and musical score, the Nintendo Switch version suffers from notable technical stability issues. The most glaring flaw encountered during a full playthrough is a recurring game crash bug.

This isn’t an isolated, one-time inconvenience, but rather a software issue that has a tendency to completely lock up multiple times across a standard run. The crash almost always occurs during the transition phase, right as you run into an enemy to start a fight.

Instead of loading the active turn timeline and rendering the battlefield, the software permanently freezes on a completely black screen, forcing you to close out the application from the Switch home menu and restart. Because of this persistent technical hiccup, saving your progress frequently at every available opportunity becomes an absolute necessity to avoid losing substantial amounts of dungeon progress.

Even with a few technical issues, this is a super-charming indie RPG worth checking out.

Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands is a super creative, super charismatic indie RPG that stands out in a crowded genre. It makes the jump from webcomics to video games and sticks the landing, with a genuinely funny story, memorable settings, witty writing, and an art style with character to spare.

The core combat system is a breath of fresh air, turning the familiar active-time turn bar into a strategic, dynamic tug-of-war using customizable measures and clever lane-swapping mechanics. Coupled with a world-class soundtrack, the actual core gameplay loop is incredibly satisfying.

Despite a few balancing issues, confusing late-game mazes, and technical stability bugs on the Switch, the incredible charm of this game makes it a highly recommended journey for any RPG fan looking for something fresh. If you are willing to overlook some frustrating game crashes and save your game often, you will find a deeply rewarding, passionately crafted musical adventure.