Hello everyone, Its me again and I have found another old game which likely nobody cares about and which I will review anyway. But to be fair, you can likely find this game still somewhere on the shelves instead of the bargain bin, so its not that bad, right?
Kings Bounty: The Legend is the successor of the original Kings Bounty which appeared in 1990. Although that is not completely correct. 1995 there was already a Kings Bounty 2 game being made, but that was renamed to Heroes of Might and Magic. Thus its not surprising that Kings Bounty has a lot in common with the Heroes of Might in Magic serie, although there are some pretty big differences.
For those that are unfamiliar with HoMM or the original Kings Bounty, those games are strategy games where you play a hero in a fantasy realm, who, other than most heroes in such games, don't fight themselves, but hire an army of various creatures and let them fight against other armies.
That doesn't mean that your hero is completely unimportant (apart from heaving a bottomless purse which pays for all the soldiers you are leading around). You do contribute to the battle in numerous ways in KB:TL. First, your statistics influence how your soldiers fight. If your attack score is high your soldiers do more damage. They take less damage if your defence is high and when you have a high intelligence you are pretty smart but that doesn't affect your soldiers at all. What your intelligence influences is how powerful your spells are. But more of that later.
There are three other statistics your hero has. Mana, which is used to cast spells, rage which is used to cast a different kind of spell and fills up by dealing and receiving damage and, most importantly, leadership which determines how many troops you can command.
Your second contribution to the battle are spells. Even a dimwit fighter can learn to cast spells in this game, but unless he increases his intelligence they won't do much. There are three types of spells in this game. Order spells which buff your troops, disruption spells to debuff your enemy and chaos spells to kill your enemy with big explosions.
In each combat round you can cast precisely one spell. And here lies a problem with the spellcasting system. The spells are a little bit unbalanced. When I have the choice between blasting half of the enemies army or increase the speed of one of my soldiers for a few turns I don't think there is much of a question of what I will do.
Only when fully upgraded do some buff and debuff spells affect everyone on the field instead of one unit, making them at least a little competitive. Still, most of the time its more effective to kill the enemy now than enable your troops to kill enemies better for a few turns. The effect is the same, except that when you blast the enemy he can't attack your soldiers back.
As I have said you can upgrade spells. Upgraded spells are more powerful but require more mana to cast. But you can always cast the spell at a lower level to save mana.
In order to upgrade spells you need the right skill and crystals which are found or given as quest reward.
There is also a second set of spell like effects in the game. During the game you will acquire a rage box, some sort of demonic super weapon in which a illustrious band of creatures are imprisoned which you can call out for a special effect. Yay for demonic pokemons.
There are 4 creatures in the box who each has 4 different abilities to use. The more often you use a certain creature the more XP it gets and it can level up to make its special attacks stronger. To use such a special attack you need rage which, as I already said, is accumulated through dealing and receiving damage. Also each creature from the box must rest after they attack.
And here is another imbalance. You can't use all creatures from the beginning. For the first two you have to do a quest to convince them to serve you. For the second two you have to go to a specific location which is not accessible right from the beginning. And if you unlock them in order you will run into the "problem" that each creature you unlock is vastly stronger than the rage creatures you had until now, meaning, as they all draw from the same power source, you will only rarely, if ever, use the other creatures again.
The final ability your hero has are his skills. Whenever you level up your hero you get runes, which you can also find by exploring. There are three type of runes, might, mind and magic. There are also three skill trees you can follow, coincidentally named might, mind and magic. Yes, the guys who made the game were not very creative in this regard. Each skill tree focuses on one specific rune, but also needs runes from other skill trees, so it is not a complete non-decision on what you spend your runes on. Each of the three classes you can take (fighter, paladin and mage) also specialize in one path, getting special skills which only this hero can unlock. For example the mage exclusive skill lets you cast twice in a turn.
The might tree focuses on getting rage and making your creatures stronger. The mind tree focuses on gimmicks like getting more XP and money and is generally regarded as pretty worthless and the magic tree, you guessed it, makes your magic spells stronger.
Additionally, when either you or one of the box creature level up you get a choice between two stat boosts, or in the case of a box creature a choice between two attack boosts, which are chosen at random. That means very often it won't be a choice at all as one of the upgrades is clearly better than the other, or, in the worst case which happens more often than you would like, both choices are bad. Yes, that is balance at work.
Your hero can also carry special items which increases his statistics and certain woman in the game which give a small bonus to specific troops and can carry additional items for you. You can even have children with your wife which permanently occupy one of your wives item slots and give a bonus ranging from totally useless to completely awesome. Reloading won't help, because like enemy placement, merchant inventory and troop availability, the order in which children are born is determined at random at the start of the game.
You can also divorce your wife who than permanently leaves after taking some of your money and the children.
Some wives you can marry (the more weird ones) include a enchanted frog princess, a dwarven woman, a zombie and a demoness.
Now for the bread and butter of this game, the combat.
Combat in this game is turn based and played on a small hex map You and your opponent start at opposing sides of the map and take turns moving your units around based on their initiative which is based on the creatures speed vale and on how happy that creature is. That is determined by what other creatures are in your army, your wife and on what items you carry. This happiness also determines the critical hit chance.
You can only command 5 different troops at once, but in each of this troops there can be as many creatures of the same type in it as your leadership allows. For example you can have one troop consisting out of 800 peasants or 3 dragons. Of course the dragons individual statistics are much better than the peasants, but there are 800 of them, meaning they do damage equal their base damage times 800. So its always a trade-off between getting swarms of low level units or a few big hitters.
Nearly all units also have special abilities, ranging from passive ones like magic immunity, over active ones like sprinting and special attacks to actual magic spells they can cast. In theory you can spend days trying to get your dream army, balancing all the creatures statistics and abilities. In practice there are two problems with this. Except from some special places the troops you can hire are limited. Once you hire all soldiers from one castle there simply won't be any soldiers there if you need more. And second are the long travel times. Certain troops can only be hired in certain places and after every bigger battle you have to walk all the way back to fill up your losses. That's simply boring, so instead you will likely just take whatever you can hire in your area.
What makes this worse is that, unless you do every quest under the sun, the battles will most of the time be very though and very often you will simply be to weak to fight battles in the area the main plot sends you to without loosing half of your army. To avoid that you have grind some side quests in a completely different, slightly easier, area which is totally unrelated to the main quest. The game lacks any form of direction and it is up to you to figure out in which order to do all the quests you get for the best results (= least frustration).
So far the game mechanics sounds like an exact copy of HoMM, so what's the difference I spoke of in the beginning? Its that there is no enemy. You won't fight an AI who also hires soldiers and runs around capturing your cities. The only enemies are random bands of monsters who patrol on fixed paths, never deviating from them. While this allows the game to progress in real time outside of combat it also removes a lot of challenge as you can take as much time as you want to do things, like running around collecting soldiers for your army. The enemies don't even respawn, so once an area is cleared it stays free of enemies.
So, what could the game do to balance out the lack of challenge? For example good storytelling and role playing. That are things it could do, but it doesn't. There isn't really any role playing in this game, not even illusionary moral choices. Every dialogue is strictly linear. That your character is as likeable as a cross between Ebenezer Scrooge and Bernard Madoff and is willing to slaughter everything for money doesn't help either. And your relationship to your wife can be compared to a relationship you would have to a pack mule, because there is not much point in having one except to carry more items. And its not that their personality is in any way interesting or even visible.
Even the most interesting characters, the creatures in your box, don't add much to the game. After they told you their life story, which they do fairly early in the game if you ask them, you will never hear any new dialogue from them again.
The story isn't in any way better. I am honest, I haven't finished the game yet, but so far I have not discovered any coherent storyline except "The king is in trouble, help him". No interesting quest arcs or anything, just the same few quests in new wrappings over and over again.
Also, the game doesn't take itself very serious, which makes good storytelling kind of impossible. And its not the good "not taking serious" which leads to a interesting, wacky game going against all conventions, but the bad sort of non-seriousness, where clichés are applied to everything, sometimes purposefully overdone and sometimes turned around for cheap giggles. Apart from that the world in Kings Bounty is pretty generic with nothing which would make it stand out from gazillions of other fantasy worlds and lacks any defining theme.
And now for the deathblow. While I talked about the battles being hard later in the game, which they are, the game itself is very easy. How can that be? Because at every point in the battle you can flee which means you loose your army and are back at the kings castle with your starting army and a little additional gold to cover your expenses. The thing is that the enemy you just fought doesn't replace his losses, meaning you can zerg everyone to death no matter how poor your army is. And when you realize this, all the challenge in the game vanishes into a cloud of pure frustration, because every time you flee you have to rebuild your army and go to where you fought your last battle which means again a lot of walking.
So, what's my rating? By now you can guess it is not good. If you see it very cheep somewhere and you want something you can play for months always a few hours a day then buy it. Otherwise stay away from it. I certainly won't get the already announced expansion, where you play the princess you rescue in the main game after she has grown up, unless they change a lot of the flaws I mentioned. That and because the baby dragon you get as ally (Get it? A princess, who normally gets kidnapped by dragons now has a dragon ally. HAHAHA..... Yes, that's the sort of "humour" you can expect in that game) looks butt ugly, like Stitch, from Lilo & Stitch with wings.
Kings Bounty: The Legend is the successor of the original Kings Bounty which appeared in 1990. Although that is not completely correct. 1995 there was already a Kings Bounty 2 game being made, but that was renamed to Heroes of Might and Magic. Thus its not surprising that Kings Bounty has a lot in common with the Heroes of Might in Magic serie, although there are some pretty big differences.
For those that are unfamiliar with HoMM or the original Kings Bounty, those games are strategy games where you play a hero in a fantasy realm, who, other than most heroes in such games, don't fight themselves, but hire an army of various creatures and let them fight against other armies.
That doesn't mean that your hero is completely unimportant (apart from heaving a bottomless purse which pays for all the soldiers you are leading around). You do contribute to the battle in numerous ways in KB:TL. First, your statistics influence how your soldiers fight. If your attack score is high your soldiers do more damage. They take less damage if your defence is high and when you have a high intelligence you are pretty smart but that doesn't affect your soldiers at all. What your intelligence influences is how powerful your spells are. But more of that later.
There are three other statistics your hero has. Mana, which is used to cast spells, rage which is used to cast a different kind of spell and fills up by dealing and receiving damage and, most importantly, leadership which determines how many troops you can command.
Your second contribution to the battle are spells. Even a dimwit fighter can learn to cast spells in this game, but unless he increases his intelligence they won't do much. There are three types of spells in this game. Order spells which buff your troops, disruption spells to debuff your enemy and chaos spells to kill your enemy with big explosions.
In each combat round you can cast precisely one spell. And here lies a problem with the spellcasting system. The spells are a little bit unbalanced. When I have the choice between blasting half of the enemies army or increase the speed of one of my soldiers for a few turns I don't think there is much of a question of what I will do.
Only when fully upgraded do some buff and debuff spells affect everyone on the field instead of one unit, making them at least a little competitive. Still, most of the time its more effective to kill the enemy now than enable your troops to kill enemies better for a few turns. The effect is the same, except that when you blast the enemy he can't attack your soldiers back.
As I have said you can upgrade spells. Upgraded spells are more powerful but require more mana to cast. But you can always cast the spell at a lower level to save mana.
In order to upgrade spells you need the right skill and crystals which are found or given as quest reward.
There is also a second set of spell like effects in the game. During the game you will acquire a rage box, some sort of demonic super weapon in which a illustrious band of creatures are imprisoned which you can call out for a special effect. Yay for demonic pokemons.
There are 4 creatures in the box who each has 4 different abilities to use. The more often you use a certain creature the more XP it gets and it can level up to make its special attacks stronger. To use such a special attack you need rage which, as I already said, is accumulated through dealing and receiving damage. Also each creature from the box must rest after they attack.
And here is another imbalance. You can't use all creatures from the beginning. For the first two you have to do a quest to convince them to serve you. For the second two you have to go to a specific location which is not accessible right from the beginning. And if you unlock them in order you will run into the "problem" that each creature you unlock is vastly stronger than the rage creatures you had until now, meaning, as they all draw from the same power source, you will only rarely, if ever, use the other creatures again.
The final ability your hero has are his skills. Whenever you level up your hero you get runes, which you can also find by exploring. There are three type of runes, might, mind and magic. There are also three skill trees you can follow, coincidentally named might, mind and magic. Yes, the guys who made the game were not very creative in this regard. Each skill tree focuses on one specific rune, but also needs runes from other skill trees, so it is not a complete non-decision on what you spend your runes on. Each of the three classes you can take (fighter, paladin and mage) also specialize in one path, getting special skills which only this hero can unlock. For example the mage exclusive skill lets you cast twice in a turn.
The might tree focuses on getting rage and making your creatures stronger. The mind tree focuses on gimmicks like getting more XP and money and is generally regarded as pretty worthless and the magic tree, you guessed it, makes your magic spells stronger.
Additionally, when either you or one of the box creature level up you get a choice between two stat boosts, or in the case of a box creature a choice between two attack boosts, which are chosen at random. That means very often it won't be a choice at all as one of the upgrades is clearly better than the other, or, in the worst case which happens more often than you would like, both choices are bad. Yes, that is balance at work.
Your hero can also carry special items which increases his statistics and certain woman in the game which give a small bonus to specific troops and can carry additional items for you. You can even have children with your wife which permanently occupy one of your wives item slots and give a bonus ranging from totally useless to completely awesome. Reloading won't help, because like enemy placement, merchant inventory and troop availability, the order in which children are born is determined at random at the start of the game.
You can also divorce your wife who than permanently leaves after taking some of your money and the children.
Some wives you can marry (the more weird ones) include a enchanted frog princess, a dwarven woman, a zombie and a demoness.
Now for the bread and butter of this game, the combat.
Combat in this game is turn based and played on a small hex map You and your opponent start at opposing sides of the map and take turns moving your units around based on their initiative which is based on the creatures speed vale and on how happy that creature is. That is determined by what other creatures are in your army, your wife and on what items you carry. This happiness also determines the critical hit chance.
You can only command 5 different troops at once, but in each of this troops there can be as many creatures of the same type in it as your leadership allows. For example you can have one troop consisting out of 800 peasants or 3 dragons. Of course the dragons individual statistics are much better than the peasants, but there are 800 of them, meaning they do damage equal their base damage times 800. So its always a trade-off between getting swarms of low level units or a few big hitters.
Nearly all units also have special abilities, ranging from passive ones like magic immunity, over active ones like sprinting and special attacks to actual magic spells they can cast. In theory you can spend days trying to get your dream army, balancing all the creatures statistics and abilities. In practice there are two problems with this. Except from some special places the troops you can hire are limited. Once you hire all soldiers from one castle there simply won't be any soldiers there if you need more. And second are the long travel times. Certain troops can only be hired in certain places and after every bigger battle you have to walk all the way back to fill up your losses. That's simply boring, so instead you will likely just take whatever you can hire in your area.
What makes this worse is that, unless you do every quest under the sun, the battles will most of the time be very though and very often you will simply be to weak to fight battles in the area the main plot sends you to without loosing half of your army. To avoid that you have grind some side quests in a completely different, slightly easier, area which is totally unrelated to the main quest. The game lacks any form of direction and it is up to you to figure out in which order to do all the quests you get for the best results (= least frustration).
So far the game mechanics sounds like an exact copy of HoMM, so what's the difference I spoke of in the beginning? Its that there is no enemy. You won't fight an AI who also hires soldiers and runs around capturing your cities. The only enemies are random bands of monsters who patrol on fixed paths, never deviating from them. While this allows the game to progress in real time outside of combat it also removes a lot of challenge as you can take as much time as you want to do things, like running around collecting soldiers for your army. The enemies don't even respawn, so once an area is cleared it stays free of enemies.
So, what could the game do to balance out the lack of challenge? For example good storytelling and role playing. That are things it could do, but it doesn't. There isn't really any role playing in this game, not even illusionary moral choices. Every dialogue is strictly linear. That your character is as likeable as a cross between Ebenezer Scrooge and Bernard Madoff and is willing to slaughter everything for money doesn't help either. And your relationship to your wife can be compared to a relationship you would have to a pack mule, because there is not much point in having one except to carry more items. And its not that their personality is in any way interesting or even visible.
Even the most interesting characters, the creatures in your box, don't add much to the game. After they told you their life story, which they do fairly early in the game if you ask them, you will never hear any new dialogue from them again.
The story isn't in any way better. I am honest, I haven't finished the game yet, but so far I have not discovered any coherent storyline except "The king is in trouble, help him". No interesting quest arcs or anything, just the same few quests in new wrappings over and over again.
Also, the game doesn't take itself very serious, which makes good storytelling kind of impossible. And its not the good "not taking serious" which leads to a interesting, wacky game going against all conventions, but the bad sort of non-seriousness, where clichés are applied to everything, sometimes purposefully overdone and sometimes turned around for cheap giggles. Apart from that the world in Kings Bounty is pretty generic with nothing which would make it stand out from gazillions of other fantasy worlds and lacks any defining theme.
And now for the deathblow. While I talked about the battles being hard later in the game, which they are, the game itself is very easy. How can that be? Because at every point in the battle you can flee which means you loose your army and are back at the kings castle with your starting army and a little additional gold to cover your expenses. The thing is that the enemy you just fought doesn't replace his losses, meaning you can zerg everyone to death no matter how poor your army is. And when you realize this, all the challenge in the game vanishes into a cloud of pure frustration, because every time you flee you have to rebuild your army and go to where you fought your last battle which means again a lot of walking.
So, what's my rating? By now you can guess it is not good. If you see it very cheep somewhere and you want something you can play for months always a few hours a day then buy it. Otherwise stay away from it. I certainly won't get the already announced expansion, where you play the princess you rescue in the main game after she has grown up, unless they change a lot of the flaws I mentioned. That and because the baby dragon you get as ally (Get it? A princess, who normally gets kidnapped by dragons now has a dragon ally. HAHAHA..... Yes, that's the sort of "humour" you can expect in that game) looks butt ugly, like Stitch, from Lilo & Stitch with wings.
