King's Bounty: The Legend

The Good
King's Bounty is a game that is easy to learn but hard to master, at least when playing on harder levels. If you have played any game in the Heroes of Might and Magic series, you will feel quite familiar with the controls.

King's Bounty is basically Heroes of Might and Magic but with more focus on the RPG-elements and with the strategic portion of the game removed in benefit of a focus on tactics and adventuring. And it works brilliantly. The best part of Heroes of Might and Magic was to explore the maps and search for treasures and tough monsters to slay. The resource management and defence of the home town was, for me at least, at times more annoying than entertaining.

In King's Bounty you are free to run around and explore as much as you want, if you're strong enough. There are an abundance of quests to take on and monster armies to battle. Oh, and frogs to marry, of course.

Yes, you read it right. In King's Bounty you can marry several different girls. Among them a dwarf, a zombie and a frog. They all give you different benefits, and although it sounds a bit silly it actually works quite well and allows you to choose your wife carefully in order to get just the right bonus for your army. Do you like to use undead? Then the zombie girl is the obvious choice for you.

The first choice you make is whether you want to be a warrior, mage or a paladin (which is a little of both). From then on you are free to build your character in whatever direction you desire as in any RPG. You choose the items (and wife) that benefits your army the most and you fight armies and solve quests in order to get stronger. It's all very simple and very addictive.

The system for hiring armies is another simple but clever thing about this game. A warrior can recruit more armies because he has a high "leadership" rating and he gains lots of "leadership" as he levels up. A mage has less "leadership" and hence has to rely on powerful spells rather than mighty armies. The different armies (there are quite a lot of them) you hire from castles, taverns, villages and such all around the map. Part of the fun is finding new places with better armies to recruit. But beware, there are often limited amounts of the better armies.

You also use something called "rage" in battle. You accumulate rage when your armies are engaging in combat with the enemy, and then you use this "rage" to set loose four different "spirits of rage" on the battlefield. These spirits all have different abilities and they also level up and grow stronger the more you use them. It's quite ingenious and it opens up a lot of lovely tactical options that allows you to deal with even overwhelming odds if you play your cards right.

The graphics aren't anything special, but the landscapes do look inviting and makes you want to explore the world, which consists of several continents full of castles and villages and forests and mountains and islands to explore. There is lots to do in this game and you'll have fun doing it.

And last but not least, there are boss fights in this game. I love it. Early on you get to fight both a giant turtle and the Kraken (a giant squid). Excellent.

The Bad
Although this is a great game in many ways, it still has some annoying flaws. The map function, for example, is not that great. It is easy to run around in circles, especially in the beginning, because you just can't find that person you're supposed to talk to since his house isn't on the map. You have to place map points yourself, which can be quite a chore.

Although the landscapes look inviting the character designs are quite boring. Much clichés and very little personality, sadly. It doesn't make that much of a difference, but it's definitely a shame.

The game crashes from time to time, at least it does for me. This is hugely annoying, of course, but if you save often you should be ok.

Some of the quests are very dull. You get a lot of requests to simply go and talk to someone and then come back. Easy cash, but in the end a waste of time since they're no fun to do. You can, however, ignore the more boring requests if you want to so it's not a huge problem.

Although the system for hiring armies is ingenious it can be a bit tedious travelling back and forth to various parts of the map to refill your favourite units. This is a problem that Heroes of Might and Magic V solved quite well with the summoning spell. Maybe something like that would be something to consider for a future patch or expansion?

The Bottom Line
It is, in many ways, a plagiarism of Heroes of Might and Magic (even the music is similar). But there are much worse games to plagiarise and King's Bounty has enough originality to stand on its own. The focus on tactics and RPG-elements rather than resource-management and strategy makes this a fresh and fun alternative for anyone looking for something decidedly familiar but yet surprisingly fresh.

The Good
I’ll do something I usually don’t and start writing about the many good parts of this game by mentioning graphics. What the graphics of King’s Bounty: The Legend aren’t is this mix of insane polygon counts, texture details and particle effects that can make you check whether you didn’t accidentally start some video card performance testing software instead when you load one of the major titles of the recent years. What this game’s graphics are, however, is absolutely gorgeous, despite the obvious loss of texture detail when you zoom in. The art style and the colors used make the game world a pleasure to look at, while all these little details that you are even likely to miss if you’re not paying attention bring it to life on your computer screen. Squirrels darting from tree to tree and poking their heads out curiously, hummingbirds flitting from flower to flower both on the adventure map and around the battlefield, crypt walls coming alive when you get close, chests opening, bones rattling or eggs moving in nests when you pass your mouse over them, the scenery details that are normally obscured during combat but become briefly visible when the camera zooms in for a few seconds for a critical hit, kill or summon, all the very brief but extremely appropriate combat animations, including the pretty hard to notice way in which each unit type celebrates victory… But I’d better stop now and simply say that this is not a demonstration of technology, but one of art…

Something else that works really well in this game is the combat. And that’s a very good thing, considering how much time you’ll spend fighting. It could easily become tedious or frustrating, especially considering the size of some of the armies you’ll be facing, but it never does. There are relatively few units, but each of them is different, most having talents and abilities that you’ll need to learn to use properly in order to make the most of them. The fact that you can only have five unit types on your side when you enter combat may seem too limiting, but it only serves to make you pick your army carefully, according to which units best fit your playing style, how well they complement each other and how effective they will be against the enemies you expect to face. The spells are also very effective if used properly, a good and patient mage being able to fully compensate for the small armies he can lead into battle and end most fights without any losses. And the Spirits of Rage only add yet another layer to the tactics once you’ll be able to command them, which will happen relatively soon after the start of the game.

And another good thing is the fact that King’s Bounty: The Legend is a long and quite addictive game. Now that may not sound like a good thing if you don’t have a lot of time to spare, but if you’re looking for a game to keep you busy for a while or at least to make you feel that you got your money’s worth if you purchased it, this is for you. You’ll always find yourself wishing to explore just a little more, to fight just one more battle or to complete just one more quest, especially since, unlike in other similar games, your movement on the adventure map is not turn-based and the duty of managing the kingdom’s economy does not fall on your shoulders. The only resource you’ll really be managing is represented by the units you can recruit, which are usually not replenished, so if you take all the units of one type available in one location you’ll need to either find another location that sells the same type of units or decide on another type to replace them with from then on.

The Bad
But not everything is good, of course. One thing that bothered me was the way wives are treated in this game. The only thing you can really do with them is have babies, since the only things you can say to your wife are that you want to have a baby or that you want to divorce her. And, especially since I’m too against having children to even have them in a game, I felt quite bad to just keep a wife sort of as an item with item slots of its own, just for the bonuses she can offer, unable to have any interaction with her. Adding a way to build a real relationship with your wife, perhaps obtaining some quests from her after marriage, and getting perhaps higher bonuses if you get along better would probably have made this aspect of the game much more interesting.

Another problem are the quests. They’re just there to keep you going, very rarely being interesting in themselves. Considering the atmosphere the game can otherwise generate, that’s a pity. Still, it doesn’t bother me as much as it normally would because the game is designed so well that it really only requires an excuse to keep playing, not a real reason. And the quests provide just that excuse and little else.

And then there’s the lack of an editor. I think a lot of interesting campaigns could have been created by the players, some of them featuring much better quests than the game itself, but this opportunity is not provided. The game has a good replay value for those who are interested, since most things are randomized and your strategy will need to be changed significantly not only according to your class but also according to the unit types and spells you’ll happen to find along your way, so the lack of an editor is more of a missed opportunity than a significant problem in itself, but it’s worth mentioning nevertheless.

I could also mention that the game’s AI isn’t going to win any prizes, but I’m not so sure that’s such a bad thing, considering the size of the opposing armies. If such powerful enemies would also use very intelligent tactics, the game would easily become frustrating or perhaps even impossible to complete for most. Still, I can’t help but be bothered when the computer makes stupid mistakes such as slowing an unit that already has the minimum possible speed or applying the same spell effect on an unit twice in the same turn.

The Bottom Line
It would be very easy to say that King’s Bounty: The Legend is just a Heroes of Might and Magic clone, only it’s not. And that’s not just because the first Heroes of Might and Magic was inspired by the original King’s Bounty, but mainly because, while being far from original in any way, it really is a different game that stands on its own. And because, at least in my opinion, it’s much better than Heroes of Might and Magic V.

In conclusion, King’s Bounty: The Legend isn’t an original game, but it’s a very good game. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s a good argument in support of the idea that standing out doesn’t necessarily require doing things differently, but it does require doing them well.