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Review King's Bounty 4.5 / 5 @ GameCyte

DarkUnderlord

Professional Throne Sitter
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Jun 18, 2002
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Tags: King's Bounty: The Legend

King's Bounty, the game that is apparently out already, <a href="http://www.gamecyte.com/review-kings-bounty-the-legend">has been reviewed by GameCyte</a>:
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<blockquote>What the strategy part entails, is that while you will basically run around a fantasy world, exploring and questing at your leisure, combat is actually done in a turn based fashion, within small, hex-based battle arenas. This might remind you of console RPGs, where combat appears separated from the rest of the game, but here the encounters don’t occur randomly. You can actually see the wandering mobs within the game’s world and only initiate combat upon touching, or perhaps after conversing with them. The Hero character you choose in the beginning — out of a limited three cliche archetypes — doesn’t actually participate in battles conventionally. Instead, his statistics affect the strength of your recruited troops, while he also allows you to cast various spells.
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[...]
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This could all get boring in the long run, but the game manages to keep your interest with its involving quests. They still consist of RPG cliches like fetching items, defeating certain enemies, or saving damsels in distress, but you can often solve a situation in different ways, perhaps even by betraying the original quest giver if another NPC makes a better offer. If you don’t pay attention to the given text and simply click through everything, you just might get yourself in trouble, or lose a particular reward you would otherwise receive, had you chosen better. All in all, like a true explorer, you have to pay attention to get the most of this game. Even the world map promotes some thinking since only major points of interest get marked, while if you want to keep track of other locations, you have to mark them by yourself. On the other hand, the writing and humour, even with a less-than-perfect translation, complement that notion and ensure that your time has been worth it.
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[...]
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It simply keeps making you play for just one more battle, to get just one more level up or one more quest completed, finally ending with one more continent explored by the early morning — and it still keeps you eager for more.</blockquote>
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Sounds like fun.
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Spotted @ <a href="http://www.rpgwatch.com">RPGWatch</a>
 

bgillisp

Scholar
Joined
Mar 18, 2005
Messages
248
Location
Iowa, USA
It is basically a HOMM clone, but it is made like an old game with the same name. Which, incidentally, the HOMM games are al modeled after the original Kings Bounty. I still recall getting a free copy of the original Kings Bounty when I bought HOMM1
 

bgillisp

Scholar
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Mar 18, 2005
Messages
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Location
Iowa, USA
I thought I heard that the designer of the first HOMM game worked on the original Kings Bounty, but I'd have to check to verify that one. Can anyone verify this?
 

Jason

chasing a bee
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Jun 30, 2005
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baby arm fantasy island
Yep, Jon Van Caneghem of New World Computing.

Sounds like a HoMM clone. Does it evolve the formula? That's the key issue, I think.
You might want to avoid KBL if that's what you're looking for for. It's a step back looking at it from a strategy perspective in the sense that there's no city building or multiple armies.
 

Gragt

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin
I'ts a remake of the original King's Bounty developped indeed by Jon Van Caneghem and released in 1990. If I remember correctly, you could choose betweem four heroes and like the new game you roamed around the countryside, gathered an army and completed quests. From this design emerged HoMM, the adventure part was replaced by the strategy.

So it's basically a throwback to an almost 20 years old game but quite a good one. It isn't the same as HoMM but they're part of the same family.
 

thenenea

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Joined
Nov 13, 2008
Messages
3
Location
Bucharest, Romania
King's Bounty

Having played this remake of King's Bounty for two days now I would venture to say it's a pretty good take on the formula. Also while being similar to the HMM series (that was inspired by the old KB) it's rather different in two base aspects: troop gathering and rpg elements. The first aspect means you cannot occupy a castle and start building to get troops / upgrades. Instead the game tries to simulate limited resources by providing specific units in limited amounts in specific places and at specific points in the quests. The number of units of a specific type you can recruit are depending on your leadership and leadership is not very easy to come by.

So at the beginning you can for example recruit 1 Archmage from the Magic Academy. Later on as you solve quests (a rather large portion of the experience is quest based not battle based) you can recruit up to ten Archmages. But that's it. Even after you get more leadership points you cannot recruit any more of this unit because there aren't any. So what you can do is either travel to a remote location (and the road is pretty well guarded) or advance the main quest so that the king can promote you to a higher rank and delegate more manpower for your army.

If you want to upgrade a unit the only thing you can do is either advance in your skill tree to a point were you can do that (and the type of units you can upgrade is pretty limited, class dependent and also very expensive in runes that are hard to come by) or travel to a specific spot that allows the hiring of the superior version of that troop. So you are more or less living off the land. It also forces a better planning of tactics to try and protect the most rare and powerful units.

The RPG elements are quite interesting and vary from dialog choises (with real alternatives like "be nice and go hunting for an item and get a bonus" or "trick and get relative way out but no branching subquest and less reward" or "give me or me kill you that opens a different branching") to subquests that can offer shortcuts for the main quest or other subquests.

Also, another thing that I liked is the fact that no area is completely safe. Even the starting map has places where you will be obliberated even at level 10, not to mention level 1. It seems a more reasonable way of placing restrictions than an invisible wall. It also helps bringing you back to a specific map at a later time (am I strong enough to beat that guy now ? Do I have some item that he/she might like and avoid the combat altogether?).

The game has also some flaws and depending on your play style they can be passable or annoying. My main gripe is the class imbalance. It's great to play as a mage, reasonable challenging to play as a paladin and impossible to play as a warrior knight. There are also some minor coding problems (in the battle screen the background can sometimes flick to the windows desktop) but the game is generally stable and not demanding for a reasonable gaming machine.

With all the above said I would recommend it at least for those with nostalgia for a TBS.
 

Naked Ninja

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Oct 31, 2006
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South Africa
I'm getting bored of it 30 minutes in. Without the base building/multiple army mechanics you just have repetitive turn-based battles (there are a LOT), some RPG upgrade mechanics and really weak dialogue/story.
 

thenenea

Novice
Joined
Nov 13, 2008
Messages
3
Location
Bucharest, Romania
Base building

Different tastes I quess.

For me it's the lack of base building that gives a little plus. Maybe because I've never been a fan of the HMM resource rush. It seems to me that a TBS should be more about managing what sparse resouces I get rather than power playing to collect as much as possible to win the tech battle. Also for me it seems to emphasize magic usage than numbers. But everyone should form his.her own opinion. My only suggestion would be to give the game a try, it's a pretty rare bird in the current game market.
 

Seldon

Educated
Joined
Jul 17, 2007
Messages
71
Location
Sweden
It is really good! Better than any of the HoMM games I've played (2-5), so I can definitely recommend it.
 

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