Customer Reviews

Kings Bounty: The Legend

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

King's Bounty is the best turn based strategy game since X-Com came out in 1993.

It works on XP and Vista 32-bit.
There may be problems with Vista 64-bit.

Concept:
King's bounty is a great mix of turn based strategy, adventure, and RPG elements. You explore a world and find items to increase your stats and gather troops for your army. If you encounter enemies, you battle them in turn based combat. You can also cast spells during the battle to heal your troops, increase their stats, weaken enemies, or alter the battleground.

Heroes
You can choose one of 3 Hero types (Warrior, Paladin, Mage) and customize them through a skill tree or equipping items. Your class, skills, stats and items affect the army that you control.
Warriors have more troops and weak magic skills. Paladins are balanced. Mages have the fewest troops but can cast the most powerful spells during the battles.
Attack - Increases the damage that your troops dish out.
Defense - Decreases the damage that your troops take.
Intellect - Increases the power of your spells.
Leadership - Increases the amount of troops you can have in a battle.
Gold - Allows you to buy new troops and items.
Runes - Allow you to buy skills on your skill tree.

Your Army
There are over 90 different types of creatures you can have in your army.
Tanks - knights, giants, dwarves...
Ranged - archers, elves, beholders...
Infantry - soldiers, snakes, spiders, pirates...
Spellcasting - priests, mages, inquisitors...
Special - werewolves, vampires, ghosts...

So, why is this game so great?
You're constantly being rewarded for playing. It seems like every 10 steps, you're getting gold, runes, new units, and leadership banners. New enemies constantly appear and change the strategy of the battles. The game never feels stale. You're always learning new spells and trying to exploit the enemies' weaknesses.

Just when you think you've got the game mastered, you gain access to new lands, new enemies, new spells, and new units.

There are tons of optional side quests, too. If you complete them, you get gold, experience, or special items. You may even make a new alliance which adds new troops to your army.

The box says rated T for Teens, but this game is fun for everyone. The descriptors say:
Drug Reference - I never saw one, although pirates talked about rum.
Language - I didn't see any harsh language.
Mild Fantasy Violence - knight swings sword, hits monster, and a 25 appears above the monster. There's no blood or impaling.

What could be better about this game?
The story is good, but the writing on some of the quests is sub-par. One of my friends had trouble playing it on Vista, but he got it working.

The game is about 40-90 hours long, depending on how you play. It's a must buy if you like turn based strategy games, old school RPG's, or want to kill time while you're waiting for Diablo III.

There are alot of nice extras in gameplay, role-playing elements and turn-based combat. You do move in real-time on world map, but it's done nicely. Graphics are real good, sound kind of repetitive. 3 character classes give it decent replay and plenty of side-quests to complete for experience points or special items to equip make it worth going through more than once. I had alot of fun with this, and enjoyed the hours of leveling up your hero and fleshing out the world map. As oppossed to another reviewer, I played mine on Vista the whole time and had no crashes or software troubles at all. Hope this helps.

First of all, I've only been playing the demo so far so my review is based on that experience. I've been playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 almost daily since it came out in 1999 and this is the first turn based strategy game I've played since then that measures up to the fun of HOMM 3 (including HOMM 4 & 5, neither of which I liked). There are more RPG elements in this game than in HOMM 3. You gather quests from various characters, complete the quests and gain experience. Combat is turn based and you can cast spells and use the Rage box, which calls various monsters to your aid for an attack during combat as long as you have enough Rage points. This is very cool with great graphics and can cause massive damage to your enemy, allowing you to turn the tide of battle if your enemy is stronger than you. Graphics are great and gameplay is very intuitive. My only complaint so far is the game has locked up my system a couple of times, but the problem may be on my end so who knows. I highly recommend this game and will be ordering it soon.

Reading the review section for Kings Bounty: The Legend I couldn't help myself and had to write my own review. I see a lot of references and comparisons made to Heroes of Might and Magic and I wish to add my point of view.

I have to point out that I have played Heroes of Might and Magic 1-5 with all official add-ons. Therefore I feel qualified to compare Kings Bounty: The Legend (hereafter KBTL) and Heroes of Might and Magic (hereafter HoMM).

I could simply state that comparing KBTL and HoMM would be to compare Fallout3 and Counter Strike, both of the later are First Person Shooters, but, oh, what a different gameplay! Since that would, however, be a cross genre reference I will go into detail about those two Turn Based Strategy Games.

KBTL offers a compelling story and one of three Heroes (all male) to explore the game world. The heroes look different and offer a different gameplay in battles, but except for one specialty skill, they all use the same skill tree. There are plenty of side quests and each decision will have an effect on the further game experience - that did not surprise you now, did it? The player is in control of his one hero and will, for the most part, just have to take care of him and his army. Gold and runes are the only resources to keep track of - runes to buy new skills and gold to hire new units. An interesting factor is leadership, which controls how many units of a certain kind the hero can control. Exceed that limit and the unit will do what it wants, even attack friendly stacks. The main story line is linear - until you do what you have been told, no new creatures will be available for hire, no new quests will be given and you are confined to the areas open for exploration at that time.

HoMM is a different kind of game, as it is not centered on an individual hero under the player's control, but is a strategy game. The player uses one or more experience gaining heroes to conquer recourse producing mines (there are six recourses), cities and other dwellings; uses the proceeds to fortify and upgrade the cities under his control and to hire new creatures for his armies. Build certain dwellings in your cities and more and better creatures are available for hire. Several races and their corresponding cities are playable, each with their own heroes and units. Hero skill trees differ greatly from race to race, and each hero does have his/her unique specialty. The game offers multiple maps and even a map editor, or the option of the random map generator - a unique map on the spot. In these maps the player will compete, with the AI for a fixed objective, most often total domination. HoMM has multi-player options for online play or in hotseat mode to play in front of one computer. For the solo-player there are campaigns for each race that follow a story line, but the story will usually unfold step by step on different maps.

In summary, besides the fact that the player controls a hero(s) with stacks of units and battles take place on a grid, Heroes of Might and Magic and Kings Bounty: The Legend do not have much in common.

The story drives Kings Bounty: The Legend, but that also reduces the replay value for me. I think Heroes of Might and Magic is a better buy and offers more repeated and therefore longer overall entertainment and enjoyment.

I am a sucker for the rpg genre and loved the Heroes of Might and magic series (HOMM).
This game originally preceded HOMM, but the title was bought out by a Russian developer and they did a marvelous job with updating the graphics and the gameplay.

The way to think of this game is that it is a pure RPG (role playing game), that utilizes a HOMM style turned based battle system. The battle mode appears in a separate window and involves quite a bit of strategy. That makes it a lot more enjoyable IMHO that your ordinary hack and slash RPG.

You really have to marshall your resources, use the right spells and attack the right troops. Your hero has a contingent of recruited monsters/armies at his disposal. This game is not easy per se, but is a lot of fun.

For those of you having trouble with either stuttering or nvidia video driver crashes, the newer drivers help and there are some game and video settings that can make things run a bit smoother, including mod.s of a game.ini file. Do some google searches.

You can read the steam forums for this game to get some good ideas.
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If you are a fan of short, but not too simple, role-playing games, this is a great choice. There's a lot of battle management, but it's doable, and difficulty can be set - I'm doing it on Normal, and it's challenging enough. The magic system is complex enough to allow a different play style between magic users and fighters. There are interesting choices that can be made to support evildoers or oppose them, to pick factions in local squabbles, and to conduct diplomacy and guard missions. I highly recommend this game as an easy to get into, hard to master, fun to play single player tactical/roleplaying masterpiece.

I just recently discovered this genre on the PC. I really enjoy turn based rpg's on consoles so I thought I would give this type of game a shot. King's Bounty is everything you could want in this type of game. Great graphics that bring the game world to life, but still able to run on a mid level system, lots of customization, and many hours of turn based strategy. The only slight drawback was the story, but the gameplay more than makes up for it.

I bought this game because I am a fan of the original King's Bounty. It brought me fond memories and I had a little bit of time to play on my laptop during my military training. I brought this back to my room and installed it. It was great, probably in need of a little modding, but well worth playing in vanilla form.

All was well until I installed some updates from Vista and lo and behold the game will no longer work. It gives me an error each time saying that SecuROM does not recognize the original disc. Now I am pissed. No where did this game warn me that it was installing SecuROM, and I would have never purchased it if I had known it was using SecuROM. Now, I am left away from home, unable to do much with my computer to combat this malware.

Killzone 2 will astonish you with its deferred rendering engine that utilizes multi-sampled anti-aliasing to produce unbelievable graphical fidelity for a home console. Burnout Paradise will have you sweating at a blistering 60 frames-per-second as you soar over skyscrapers crashing through billboards (queue 80s rock DJ!) Madworlds protagonist, Jack, wants to violently seduce you as he chainsaws his way throughout a blood-spattered--Frank Miller enthused--world justly confirming that it really is a mad mad Madworld he lives in. But recently I was plucked out of the hardcore gaming stratosphere to be reminded that gaming isn't always about boiling your blood with crazy gameplay antics or pumping your adrenaline over its procedural merit.

King's Bounty: The Legend is here to say it is ok to slip back to a more classic style of gameplay and focus on strategy while having a good time. It's ironic that I initially found King's Bounty: The Legend to be precisely the game I wasn't looking for. For the last two years I've been feverishly pushing forward at 180 mph playing everything I can get my hands on. To name a few, I've played through to completion F.E.A.R. 2, Mass Effect (five times), Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 (twice), Dead Space, Metal Gear Solid 4, Grand theft Auto 4 (twice), leveled a Priest to 80 in Warcraft obtaining 4/5 of my Tier 7 gear, and really just about everything else imaginable. I consume games and love every minute of it (hence the name of this blog). But after spending some times with the game I realized I almost missed out on something special and now I'm here to inform my fellow gamers they might be too.

King's Bounty will be instantly familiar to anyone who's played the Hero's of Might and Magic series. That is to say it's a turn-based tactical RPG that takes place in a fantasy setting. You control one of three character classes (Fighter, Paladin or Mage) in real-time, traversing a map overflowing with treasures, monsters, and NPCs. These NPC bestow quests upon you which push you farther and farther into the recesses of the world. Sometimes you'll just fall into a wacky situation--I once chatted up a stump only to discover he ailed of distraught and was in dire need of help. How could one resist!

As you progress through the game your character will gain new abilities through the now ubiquitous skill tree, obtain new weapons and armor from merchants and treasure chests, and venture off to new lands. These lands are segmented by portals that whisk you to-and-fro consisting of super-green grasslands, dank mines, eerie swamps, chilly ice-lands, gloomy forests and scorching dungeons.

The turn-based warfare takes place in a completely separate battle-screen that essentially resembles a chessboard. Though this might sound a bit dowdy, the board is modified throughout the game to vary movement strategies.

I do not remember the last time I played a game that possessed such a vibrant, colorful, hand-drawn palette. When I saw the menu screen for the first time I just sat there staring at the beautifully drawn image analyzing its absurd level of detail. Unfortunately, once in the game, the game loses that level of impressiveness and moves to something more similar to the Warcraft series. But that's not to say it isn't a good looking game. Although clearly inspired by Blizzard's work, there does seem to be just enough of a departure from it to tell the two apart. Overall it is a very visually appealing game.

If there is going to be a downside to King's Bounty it will probably be that it really does nothing new in this particular genre, and some might perceive it as borrowing heavily from the above mentioned Heroes of Might and Magic series. The interesting twist is that the original King's Bounty came out in 1991--four years before the Heroes of Might and Magic series. For me personally this was never an issue, but I suspect that this will be a source of contention for some.

The dialog that carries the story can be a bit monotonous at times as its standard fantasy fare. It's worth noting that the Russian developer, Katauri Interactive, tried to inject some comedic value into the dialog to liven things up.

With King Bounty I realized I was letting a small portion of the gamer in me miss out on something special just because I was caught up in the mix of things. If you're looking for something to change that up you should give this game a chance--it's worth your money.

If you're interested in more go to eat-games.blogspot dot com.

This is an excellent update / refresh of the classic PC game from 1990. King's Bounty was one of my favorite games for the Amiga "back in the day". KB:TL differs in many ways from the original game, but the core element of turn-based combat on a hex field is pretty much unchanged and is just as entertaining now as it was then.

What I Liked:
- Fantastic graphics. The art style is vibrant and colorful. The isometric 3D view is well presented and gives a nice sense of depth and topography.
- Engaging turn-based tactical combat. Units have varied strengths and skills that require coordination. Balancing out your army with units that are fast (high initiative) vs. ranged attack vs. damage absorbing vs. high movement rate and so on is very satisfying. The game does a good job of forcing you to churn your army and learn different units because a) most units have a limited supply - once you buy them all up you have to switch to something else and b) units do not grow in strength, so while level 1 peasants and swordsmen are fine at the beginning, eventually you will need to switch over to more powerful units to take out the stronger enemies.
- The skill tree system is simple, clear, and effective. No wall chart like Civilization 4 is required. You can specialize in troop enhancement or magical power or try to blend both.
- Decent spell system. The spells are well differentiated and have a nice mix of flavor between direct damage, unit enhancement, etc. While it isn't as deep or sophisticated as games like Master of Magic, it is quite functional and provides variety and excitement into the combat.
- No enemy AI to compete against. While I enjoyed several of the Heroes of Might and Magic games (which were spawned from the original King's Quest game btw) I never cared for the competition element of facing AI controlled heroes who wander the map collecting resources and attacking your troops. It seemed like on lower difficulty levels the AI opponents were just fodder and not much of a challenge, while on harder difficulty levels you could play for 20 hours and then run into an opponent that was so vastly superior to your forces that he wiped you out. In KB the world is static, which is more to my liking. If you come across an army too powerful for you, simply avoid it and come back later after you've gained a few levels and hired stronger units. You don't have to worry about that unit finding your home base and taking you out of the game.

What I Didn't Like:
- Software isn't stable. Many people have reported crashes and lock-ups with the game. It worked fine for me, and so it might work fine for you too, but be aware that some people have come across serious errors that prevent them from continuing to play the game. One known problem (as of this writing) is that the game crashes a third of the way into it if you have 64-bit Vista. Hopefully they come out with a patch for that.
- Graphics glitches. These were minor, but worth mentioning. Water in particular was a problem on my system. Sometimes while rotating the camera when water was on the screen, horizontal planes of light blue would appear and cover up the land beneath them. It was simple to get rid of them (just rotate the view a little more) but they were still annoying. Combat on a beach also had a problem where some units would appear faded out because they had a blue (water colored) overlay on top of them. Again, this is minor but really should have been fixed.
- Anemic rulebook. This is my biggest complaint with the game. The instruction manual is way too brief and does not contain anywhere near enough information, and the "tutorial" is laughable. For example, nowhere in the instructions does it tell you how to rotate the camera view. I found it completely by accident and it is something that is critical to know (you press and hold the right mouse button and then move the mouse). The "tips" on the load screens are very informative and fill you in on some of the details that aren't in the manual, but on my system they go by so fast you don't have time to read them.
- No unit stat chart is provided. While it is more of an "action RPG" than a deep strategy game, it still would be helpful to have a table with all the unit types available in the game, their stats (attack, defense, initiative, etc.), special abilities, leadership cost, etc. so you can easily compare different units and plan your army accordingly.
- Trite storyline & side quests. You expect a decent story in an RPG...even an "action" RPG. The story in KB:TL is strictly passable. The side quests are particularly trite (go get object X from person Y and bring it to me). While this didn't dissuade me from finishing the game, it could have been done better.

Anyway, I enjoyed the game and encourage fans of the original King's Bounty, the Heroes of Might & Magic games, the Disciples games, and even Diablo fans to check it out. It has that addictive quality of leveling up your character, finding loot, and fighting increasingly difficult opponents that all of those games share.