King's Bounty is out - 90% review from Gamespy

[A user named cat]

So has anyone finished it yet or gotten close to the end? Feels like I've been playing it for ages, yet am only at the underground dwarf mines. You guys were right about the gold issue on normal difficulty, I'm almost at 400k. Battles are still tough though, at least some of them.

I also found a thread most definitely worth checking out, quite a few finished mods. Most notable are the easier to read fonts mod and a camera tweak to increase height distance.

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=3921&page=2

 

[Castanova]

So far I'm really enjoying this game. I've only got a level 4 mage right now and I'm still exploring that first island, though. The balancing in this game is supremely bizarre, I have to say. There's no linear progression in terms of areas. You just kind of go to one area, kill the 1 or 2 armies there that are beatable without significant casualties, leave to another area, kill 1 or 2 armies.. repeat. It seems that at any given time, 98% of the enemies are too difficult to even try and most of the playtime is spent locating that 2%.

I still haven't finished the King's request to deliver that Royal Seal to his brother... and there's some "Overpowering" Hero guarding the way. This game is gonna take forever!

 

[made]

"There's no linear progression in terms of areas."

That's exactly what makes it so refreshingly "oldschool" compared to most recent games, imo. You have to dodge/outrun impossible fights and come back later when you're strong enough. I still find plenty of easy enemies to "grind" on, though.

Small tip:

Spoiler

I'd suggest doing the king's mission asap, as that opens access to the Rage powers which make battles both easier and also more interesting.

 

[Jaime Lannister]

Never played HoMM, so I got the demo, went in as an Easy Warrior and loved it. Seriously, GotY 2008. The story sucks, and there's no C&C, but the combat just kicks ass in every way possible. Exploration feels fun and dangerous too. 9.5/10.

 

[Zhuangzi]

I'm glad you guys are liking it. It is definitely GOTY for me too. It takes around 60-70 hours to play through the game (on Hard, this is) and there is enough randomness in the generation of artifacts, plus the fact that there are three classes (Warrior, Paladin, Mage) to ensure replayability. Consequently, I'm now about 1/4 of the way through the game for a second time.

Seriously, I got this game 14 days ago, and I've been playing it for at least 4 hours, and sometimes as much as 8, each day. :shock: But I have to go back to work on Monday.

 

[Heresiarch]

I just finished the game yesterday, difficulty hard, game time 121 days. I've played over a whole week non-stop. About 8 hours each day (not kidding, I've got a whole week of holiday).

I must admit at the very very last area I just skipped all the mobs and go straight to the final battle(s), as all the enemies in the final area are insanely difficult to beat without suffering heavy casualties. Here are some small personal gripes (small spoilers):


1. Apparently the game difficulty setting only make the random mobs become (much) stronger, while having little to no effect on those story critical battles. Thus on hard you'll find that the wandering armies are MUCH stronger than, say, the major battle at a castle. The final story battles are also easier than the wandering mobs too.

2. Not really a annoyance but rather feel amazed, the Armageddon spell in KOB is FUCKING POWERFUL. Dragons + Armageddon is one of the more powerful late game comboes in HOMM, but in KOB Armageddon can kill EVERYTHING. The most important part is your own army suffer only 35% of the damage. Almost all the seemingly unbeatable combats (like the level 3 gremlin fights, or the Keeper of Truth second fight) can be solved with (clever) use of Armageddon. And LOTS of money to buy back the troops of course...

3. The difficulty. Just as I said before, normal mobs in late game are very powerful and very tedious to kill, while the mission important battles feel quite underpowered. I've finished the final battle in turn 2.



Other than these little thought, I must say I feel very pleased with the game. The story does not suck at all, it's rather fairy talish, but once you get to the final part of the game getting know all what behind the whole plot, at least for me, I felt pretty surprised. And there are tons of interesting stuff to read in the game too. The area design of the game is excellently done, beautiful with much variety.

Personal rate: MUST BUY!

 

[Castanova]

The one thing that bothers me about the game for the Mage class is how I've already got like 15 spells memorized and yet there's never any chance to use any of them. Battles are so short and it's so important to keep your troops from taking any damage at all that it just doesn't make sense to cast some dumb debuff spell when you can just launch a Magic Pole Axe and slaughter a bunch of the enemies. The only spells I've ever used, historically, are Flaming Arrow, Fireball, Trap, and Magic Pole Axe. Now I only use Fireball and Magic Pole Axe.

 

[Spectacle]

I agree about the magic, generally its a waste to cast anything but your most powerful damage spells. Maybe it would have been better if you were limited to casting spells costing X mana per turn, instead of the strict 1/2 limit? The buffs tend to be cheap in mana, so you could squeeze in a few next to the damage spells.

 

[Troll]

yeah, i'm in the elf land on impossible and so far the main quests have been a breeze but i keep running from some adventure map monsters

as for the spells - use higher difficulty levels and the higher number of troops will force you to use other spells. on impossible only damage spell i use i geyser, the others are not worth the investement

 

[Zhuangzi]

The one thing that bothers me about the game for the Mage class is how I've already got like 15 spells memorized and yet there's never any chance to use any of them. Battles are so short and it's so important to keep your troops from taking any damage at all that it just doesn't make sense to cast some dumb debuff spell when you can just launch a Magic Pole Axe and slaughter a bunch of the enemies. The only spells I've ever used, historically, are Flaming Arrow, Fireball, Trap, and Magic Pole Axe. Now I only use Fireball and Magic Pole Axe.

As you get into the endgame you will be facing enormous stacks - therefore the damage spells like Magic Pole Axe aren't nearly as useful. In late game as a Paladin (hard difficulty) I found myself using Phantom virtually every turn to create a cannon fodder army.

121 game days, Heresiarch? I thought I was taking my time and I did it in 49. But congrats for winning the game; I personally can't stop playing.

 

[Heresiarch]

Lol, I'm a perfectionist so I did a lot of running back and forth filling my stacks back to full.

About spells: fireball do dominate the battlefield....only early on. Later on enemy stacks will become so big that most damage spells are nothing but a scratch to them. Trust me, when facing a stack of 200 death knights or 1000 zombies, haste > fireball hundreds of miles away. And you can try to kill a stack of 300 orc veteran or 200 demons with just damage spells and see how little casualties you can suffer from.

PS: after the middle part of game, the spells I used most are Sheep, Blind, Fear, Slow, Haste, and....Resurrect, lol. Direct damage spells like Fire Rain still works wonders on clearing out smaller stacks though. But against massive armies, support spells are the only way to win.



BTW: the Spirits of Rage are absolutely wonderful. Dishing out thousands of damage with a single Soul Drain is extremely satisfying. And the Clot Armor is one of TAH BEST protective ability to use in the game (full invulnerability for one enemy attack, not a single spell does the same thing).

 

[cutterjohn]

Apparently $29.99 this week @ Circuit City, thinking about picking it up...hope it runs under win2k...

 

[Kingston]

I don't know, there doesn't seem to be that much challenge in the end. Yea, there are fights where you'll get your ass handed to you in a hearbeat, but all you have to do is wonder around and fight some lower people to get levels. There's no sense of urgency, no do-or-die moments and decisions. Maybe I'm not far enough in the game yet.

In HoMM for instance, it gets real tense when you are away from your castle and an enemy hero closes in on your castle. You've only got a couple of turns, what units to buy? Why didn't I get another hero earlier!!? Do I turn back with my hero in case my castle gets taken or do I carry on further adventuring because I think the castle will hold.

None of this in KB so far. You can run around the tougher enemies, do the quests, kill the lower level enemies. I'm not really sure why I'm doing it all.

 

[Heresiarch]

Well, King's Bounty is more of a RPG rather than HOMM which is a strategy game - when you play a RPG you'll want to avoid the impossible encounters, do the easy fed-ex and goblin-killing quests to earn experience, level up and then go back later for the harder quests, don't you?

 

[Micmu]

In HoMM for instance, it gets real tense when you are away from your castle and an enemy hero closes in on your castle. You've only got a couple of turns, what units to buy? Why didn't I get another hero earlier!!? Do I turn back with my hero in case my castle gets taken or do I carry on further adventuring because I think the castle will hold.

None of this in KB so far. You can run around the tougher enemies, do the quests, kill the lower level enemies. I'm not really sure why I'm doing it all.

How very unfortunate. That's the exactly kind of thing I DID like very very much in HoMM (3). You had to keep your castles defended. Sometimes AI decided to attack your castle anyway and got a thorough beating (or you lost a castle, which I considered a fair deal). Your defense heroes could gain quite a few levels with just defending. I also kept a scouting hero for purposes of detecting the enemy faster (who also had a task to collect gold, resources and army from mills, forts, pond, etc...). What I hated about HoMM 5 (besides many other things) was that you couldn't bring 3 best heroes to the other map...
This somehow diminished my interest in KB (GRRR still waiting my order, WTF I'm going with a baseball bat over there)... I hope it makes up with other neato features.

 

[cutterjohn]

One of the reviews I read mentioned that because of the randomness of the game that you could start a game with some incredibly tough mobs right on the beginning map, then have the end game be a bunch of cheese battles. It's from the review on the first page where somone quoted it out of context wishing for a full quick resolve for battle options, as the reviewer specifically meant it for the case of these no-possible-way-to-lose-cheese-battles...

 

[A user named cat]

So did anyone try the mods I linked to?

Curious if I was the only one having trouble reading the small dialogue fonts, having to sit with my face plastered to the monitor basically. Zooming the camera way out makes it so much easier to navigate, especially when backtracking certain areas. Someone also created an interface mod, combining quite a few nice tweaks like color coded enemy descriptions and critical hit chances. This shit should be in the next patch.

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=4033

There's also some .ini tweaks you can mess with, like 'showflyingdead 1' which will display the number of units killed instead of damage dealt.

 

[cutterjohn]

Heh, thought I saw that box a few months ago down in the deep dark and dank recesses of the basement and popped up with my very own copy of the original King's Bounty, (C) 1990 MSDOS version requiring a staggering 384KB of RAM, CGA/EGA/MCGA/VGA/Hercules/Tandy compatible.

Also sporting as a feature on the stuckon label with the requirements:
NO COPY PROTECTION (!)

1 3.5" floppy... time to break out DOSBOX.

How's the new one compare to this? Apparently neither of the reviewers whose reviews that I've read so far bothered to compare them. Heh, they probably never een played the original:
Choose:
Sorceress, Knight, Paladin, or Barbarian ....

[EDIT]
Oh, yeah, the boxed categorized it as a "Fantasy Strategy Game by Jon Van Carneghem"
[/EDIT]

 

[Black_Willow]

Heh, thought I saw that box a few months ago down in the deep dark and dank recesses of the basement and popped up with my very own copy of the original King's Bounty, (C) 1990 MSDOS version requiring a staggering 384KB of RAM, CGA/EGA/MCGA/VGA/Hercules/Tandy compatible.

Also sporting as a feature on the stuckon label with the requirements:
NO COPY PROTECTION (!)

1 3.5" floppy... time to break out DOSBOX.

How's the new one compare to this? Apparently neither of the reviewers whose reviews that I've read so far bothered to compare them. Heh, they probably never een played the original:
Choose:
Sorceress, Knight, Paladin, or Barbarian ....

[EDIT]
Oh, yeah, the boxed categorized it as a "Fantasy Strategy Game by Jon Van Carneghem"
[/EDIT]

You have only three heroes to choose from. They are all men. And they're gay, with paladin being the gayest hero in RPGs/strategy games EVAH.

 

[Kraszu]

They can even get married, just like every gay man do for cover.

 

[VonVentrue]

So, encouraged by a great deal of positive feedback KG's receiving from pretty much everyone, I have finally decided to download the demo and give it a try.
Wow. Taking into consideration the fact my expectations were fairly moderate, I wasn't prepared for such an excessive level of awesomeness. Beautifully vibrant, colourful art, fairly challenging combat, no quest compass or handholding in any form, quests that occassionally have multiple ways to solve them... The game's bloody astonishing and kept me playing for long hours, my expectations for Disciples III have risen drastically.

On a side note, I heard the track from Age of Decadence playing in the background during the introductory sequence. Color me surprised.

 

[Zhuangzi]

So, encouraged by a great deal of positive feedback KG's receiving from pretty much everyone, I have finally decided to download the demo and give it a try.
Wow. Taking into consideration the fact my expectations were fairly moderate, I wasn't prepared for such an excessive level of awesomeness. Beautifully vibrant, colourful art, fairly challenging combat, no quest compass or handholding in any form, quests that occassionally have multiple ways to solve them... The game's bloody astonishing and kept me playing for long hours, my expectations for Disciples III have risen drastically.

On a side note, I heard the track from Age of Decadence playing in the background during the introductory sequence. Color me surprised.

As far as I'm concerned, KB is basically a replacement for Disciples III. If D3 sucks, this will have filled the gap.

There's no castle defense in this game. None. This is where it differs somewhat from Disciples 2 and presumably the HOMM series (haven't played it). But if you liked Disciples II like I did, you might remember that it was pretty much based around one uber-stack with lots of piddly stacks that you couldn't take from level to level. It used to annoy me that in every new mission you had to build up and upgrade your forces from scratch, and that you couldn't develop more than one hero. So for me Disciples II was basically a RPG with a fairly weak strategic layer anyway.

All of this is done away with in King's Bounty. The world is huge enough for you to have hours of fun, and it rarely drags into xp grind. Yes, you do have to select your fights carefully, and this may mean avoiding some massive stacks of enemies (there are a couple of these in the first location, Greenwort). Also, in another change from Disciples 2, the enemies move on the worldmap (they did a little in Disciples 2 but most were static). Therefore you can lure them out and run around them quite easily. I used to find the pace of Disciples 2 a little slow at times due to the turn based global layer. In King's Bounty this is in realtime, which makes things happen quicker.

This game, and this developer, is seriously old-school. The game doesn't have everything (no castle management, no real choices and consequences - its not a 'moral desicions' type of RPG) but what it does have is better than I have seen in many years, maybe ever. This is like a game that could have been released in 1992 but with modern graphics.

Oh, and lastly, King's Bounty has outstanding tactical turn based combat. It's far better than Disciples 2 and what I saw of the HOMM V demo.

 

[VonVentrue]

Indeed, the game remains wonderfully faithful to the C64 original, which is a huge plus in my book.

Oh, and lastly, King's Bounty has outstanding tactical turn based combat. It's far better than Disciples 2 and what I saw of the HOMM V demo.

Akella got rid of the (let's admit it - relatively annoying) front/rear row setup, here's hoping the bold move of removing it actually pays off in the form of much more engaging and tactically deep combat system.

 

[Kraszu]

I don't know, there doesn't seem to be that much challenge in the end. Yea, there are fights where you'll get your ass handed to you in a hearbeat, but all you have to do is wonder around and fight some lower people to get levels.

Is that the case for impossible also? I just had played it a little, but on harder settings you could be forced to plan most battles good to not loose resources + plan character progression good.

In HoMM for instance, it gets real tense when you are away from your castle and an enemy hero closes in on your castle. You've only got a couple of turns, what units to buy? Why didn't I get another hero earlier!!? Do I turn back with my hero in case my castle gets taken or do I carry on further adventuring because I think the castle will hold.

On other hand homm could get annoying when it turned into cat & mice game. Maybe I am missing something but basically you can't split your army from best hero whithout huge advantage. If you split it then his hero will just roll over small armies whit little losses. Map control is something that this game is lacking in many other games you can defend some points of the map for long time (like chokes + you can have terrain advantage), and since he can't attack whit his all army at once they can hold and actually be cost effective even when fighting against stronger enemy.

 

[made]

In the Elf lands atm. Think I'm nearly finished with the game and still not bored of it, which says a lot about its quality.

Any word of a mod that allows Rage Spirits to lvl past 30? I'm lvl 23 and the Earth Spirit is already capped due to me spamming his AOE ability every battle. Would be cool to still have progression past this point as leveling up the spirits is a good chunk of the fun.