King's Bounty: The Legend

"Don't know if 'Bounty' is the right word, maybe 'sufficiency'?"

As a huge Heroes of Might and Magic fan, I eagerly anticipated the release of this game, which is 'remake' of the 1990 classic King's Bounty that spawned the dynasty of HoMM games.

King's Bounty: The Legend stays mostly true to its namesake, with real time exploration of a massive world combined with tactical turn based fantasy combat. Having played any of the HoMM titles, one could be forgiven for thinking this game a clone, had the original King's Bounty not preceeded HoMM by half a decade.

If you've ever played HoMM, KB:tL will be immediately familiar to you, disregarding the lack of turns on the overland map. If you haven't, it's like this:

As the newly made Treasure Seeker of the Kingdom of Darion, it is your mandate to explore the land with your army, finding treasure for the king. You choose a character, either a Warrior, Paladin or Mage, and proceed to adventure around, slaying monsters in turn based combat on a hex grid, gaining experience in typical RPG style, learning new abilities, finding gold, buying magical artefacts to heighten your powers and generally making a hero or villain of yourself.

Although purported to be an RPG, the game is not really an RPG at all, or at least, is only really as much an RPG as HoMM. Yes you can talk to people and do quests, but the treatment is childlike and nominal. Almost everything you're asked to do amounts to killing enemies, walking from one place to another, or collecting random stuff. As you kill enemies and complete 'quests', you gain experience and level up, gaining new tactical abilities or increasing the number or troops you can command or their statistics. For all intents and purposes, KB:tL is turn based tactical combat with some 'exploration' thrown in.

The story is very poorly presented, and I do mean VERY. It succumbs to every fantasy cliche you've ever heard of, and then turns them into something even more generic. Want your standard pointy-eared forest dwelling, noble evles? Check. Techno mad dwarves? Check. Dynastic Humans? Yup. Stereotypical Orcs, Undead and Demons, straight from Warhammer? No problem. The story amounts to saving the world from a dire threat, but you don't really find out what the threat is, or even that there is one, until about 10-20 minutes from the end, if that. In a game that could take you 40-50 hours to complete, that ain't cool. Everything else to do with the story is simply saving random idiots from doom and destruction.

This might not be so bad, if I could believe that the writing was actually inteded to be satirical or a parody. It's translated from Russian, so probably it loses something, but most of the time you just want to believe that the people who came up with it had poking fun at fantasy in mind, or the game would make you howl considering how bad the writing is.

The primary element of the gameplay, the tactical combat, is very solid. There is a diverse variety of troops, there are many special abilities, spells and items to make use of, and new options that open up as your character grows in power. The three character types, Warrior, Paladin and Mage each play slightly differently. The Warrior focuses on recruiting more troops and augmenting their abilities with his skills. The Mage naturally focuses on magic spells, providing either raw destructive power, or useful utility effects such as slow, haste or blessing. The Paladin draws on a mix between both, and has added utility against undead and demons to boot.

Fans of HoMM will find exactly the same combat that they've been longing for, fleshed out with many new troop skills and abilities, as well as many traditional ones. Some good developments are adding Action Points to regiments, so that they can move a couple of steps, wait until later in the turn, and then take the rest of their turn (though their turn is over once they attack, no matter how many AP are left). The other semi-new option is rage and the rage box, which works in a similar fashion to the Barbarian sides' abilities in HoMM 5. Gather some rage from fighting and killing enemies, and you can eventually summon any of 4 spirits that can do various things similar to a mage's spells, but sometimes with unique qualities.

All in all the combat is excellent, but the overall execution is let down by some other elements that I'll get into later.

For die hard tactical combat fans, KB:tL comes with 4 difficulties, so you can challenge yourself at whatever level you desire. However, the way the game is designed shows up the flaws in this concept.

On easy, you will probably never, unless you're very stupid, encounter a fight that you cannot win on your first attempt. If you like instant gratification, or just want to see the story or quests (though why you would is beyond me) this is the way to go. The game is really balanced around normal difficulty. You will have some challenging fights, and you will have to somewhat choose your fights in order to progress in the game. Mage spells and spirit summons are balanced around challenging combat in normal mode. Hard mode requires you to pick every fight carefully, and it will be a struggle to make money and keep a full army if you're not careful. Impossible difficulty means that you have to choose to fight only the weakest enemies you can find, and defeat them flawlessly in order to make any money at all.

Now, none of this would be a problem, except for a couple of small flaws. One, the tactical combat is sooooooooooooooooooooooo slooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. The first battle I had in this game, I opened up the options menu and looked for the option to accelerate the animations, or maybe even an autocombat feature. Nothing. Everything in combat happens so slowly, all the units take their time to move and attack, and your summons take forever (not as long as FF, sure, but still too damn long, and they're unskippable). I'm wondering right now how I managed to finish the game twice, plus playing it halfway through on each other difficulty level.

If you play on Hard or Impossible, expect to spend a ton of time either running back to replenish troops from town, or running all over the countryside trying to find an enemy that you can beat up without suffering too many casualties. Neither of these things are hard, just needlessly time consuming, and boring. Not what you want to have in game, really...

Also, the fact that there is no time pressure, either from an opponent or an artificial limit, means that the difficulty of the game can be a non-issue, because you can always choose to fight the easiest opponent you can find. The original KB had a time limit, which worked in its favour.

Another issue about the game is its implementation as a single player game only. The tactical combat is very sound, and would work exellently upon being ported somehow to multiplayer. The exploration element of the game, being in real time, wouldn't. Bad move.

The next thing is that in the single player game, many troop types only appear as you progress through the game. This wouldn't be so bad, but it somewhat removes the ability to use certain types of troops against certain others, because you just don't get them until late in the game, and by then, most creatures in other locations are long gone. Yet another problem that some multiplayer or perhaps skirmish maps could fix. As well, you'll be fighting the same groups of enemies over and over and over and over and over and... you get the picture. Someone really should tell game developers that more of the same is rarely a good thing. A few memorable battles will beat an infinite number of forgettable ones any day of the week.

I do have to give the developer kudos for making this game essentially playable as an Iron Man type game (no saving/loading). If you lose all of your troops in a battle, you manage to escape back to town, whereupon the King will give you some new troops (for a while anyway) and some gold to get you back on your feet (again, for a while). This means that you can challenge yourself not to simply save/load your game all the time, and the challenge of it is to finish the entire game without running short of money, or troops to buy. I would love this aspect of the game if it played more like the original King's Bounty, and was more random in nature, and had a time limit. That would actually make sense. Considering that KB:tL clocks in at at least 20-30 hours on Easy, if not more, you could spend half your life trying to finish it Iron Manning Impossible mode. Not to mention that that would be extremely boring.

On the plus side, the art direction in KB:tL is oustanding. It is, as I said, somewhat of a parody of High Fantasy. Everything is done in a cartoony style, ala World of Warcraft, but a little more so. Colours are vibrant, buildings are modeled attractively, units look appropriate for what they represent. It looks like your typical fantasy world, satirised. It's a good style.

The music was probably the high point of the game for me. Some of the tracks are incredibly catchy sweeping orchestral motifs, and come in a variety of moods all appropriate for the general area you're exploring. The music actually managed to do the most to make me feel like an adventurer and hero when the story and gameplay fell flat. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the composer for KB:tL is also working on some other forthcoming titles that I'm looking forward to (eg. Age of Decadence) and I can't wait to hear more from him. Sound effects themselves are fairly unremarkable, your standard fantasy game fare, and (fortunately in my opinion, I like reading) there are no voiceovers. There is a fair amount of text, but it's pretty much forgettable, and probably not worth your time to read anyway.

All in all, KB is a mixed blessing. It has all of the solid tactical combat that you would want from a successor to the game that inspired Heroes of Might and Magic, yet it's let down by a lack of multiplayer, lack of a map editor, its linear, barely replayable single scenario, and the mind-numbingly slow speed of combat. Graphics and sound are fine, they're everything you need, and the game is extremely stable and generally well-polished. I think the developer has a lot of potential, so I can only hope that they innovate a little more in any sequel or expansion.

Summary

Gameplay: 8/10
Tactical combat is extremely solid, but exploration concept needs a lot of work. Tedious and pointlessly time-consuming on Hard or Impossible, but not challenging.

Sound: 9/10
Music is exceptional, sound effects are reasonable but nothing special.

Art Direction: 10/10
Beautifully pulled off, polished, and a consistent style overall. Nothing out of place, no graphical glitches.

Replayability: 1/10
Totally linear, the only benefit would be to see the abilities and playstyle of the other characters, but the single player scenario is not randomized enough to make this viable. No alternative scenarios, no multiplayer, no skirmish.

Story and Writing: 2/10
Rubbish, but possibly from the translation. Gave it an extra point because it may have been trying to parody fantasy, but I could never be sure.

Overall: 7/10
Serious tactical gameplay let down by lack of replayability, lack of multiplayer, and a shortsighted explorative gameplay design.

You can get this fairly cheaply (~$20) online from several international retailers. If you like HoMM it's probably worth it, and if you don't mind a fair bit of repetition in your tactical games, it most definitely is, and that would bump it up to 8/10.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/27/09

Game Release: King's Bounty: The Legend (EU, 02/13/09)