Strong Bad's trademark humor is intact, as expected. His commentary makes clicking on every object and NPC a worthwhile endeavor, and watching the masked one curtail the success of his friends' bands is certainly amusing, as are the antics of the bands themselves. Sabotaging the bands requires lots of ingenuity on Strong Bad's part, and while the plot is appropriately silly, aiding Strong Bad in reaching his goal does make for a good time.

Unfortunately, the arbitrary solutions to some of the puzzles in Baddest of the Bands sometimes makes attaining your objectives more frustrating than it is entertaining. Most adventure games feature items whose functions initially seem indecipherable, but after exploring other scenes, their uses eventually reveal themselves in classic "Oh, of course!" type moments.


Not so in Baddest of the Bands. Many solutions are blatantly Strong Bad in nature, meaning that the goofiest, most random ways of applying items is what puts you back on the narrative's course. The problem isn't that some puzzles are difficult, but esoteric. Instead of "Ah-ha!" moments, I often sat back, shrugged, and said, "Whatever" before continuing the game. Adventure games should make the player feel clever. Brute force puzzle solutions, which consist of clicking every item in your inventory on every interactive set piece, does not make one feel clever.

Item locations can also be integral to adventure game puzzle solving, but many items in Baddest of the Bands are simply scattered around the oddest of locations while waiting to be picked up and attached to something. You might argue that this is the case in every adventure game ever made, but it's not. Fortunately, this scenario isn't too prolific in Strong Bad 3, but it was frequent enough to make me consider clicking every pixel on the screen, which, again, is not fun.