Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Chris Miller

I like to think I’m fairly informed abut the gaming industry.  I can rattle off a list of both AAA and indie titles a mile long, and usually have my purchases planned out months in advance.  I know which series I like, which I steer clear of, and which are worth plunking down my hard earned cash for.  Every once in a while, however, a game sneaks in completely under my radar and is a unexpected surprise.  King’s Bounty is just such a game.

I’d heard some extremely positive message board chatter about King’s Bounty, but when the term “Heroes of Might and Magic clone” popped up, it immediately grabbed my attention.  The word “clone” gets tossed around a lot in the gaming industry.  Any medieval hack-n-slash games are considered Diablo clones.  Dark, gloomy FPS games are still referred to as Doom clones.   Typically, it means that a game is similar to – but not nearly as good as - the original source material.   Is that an apt description of King’s Bounty?  Let’s put it through its paces and find out.

Some games are labors of love for their creators, and some games are developed by people who are simply punching a clock for a paycheck.  It’s typically pretty easy to spot which is which, and King’s Bounty falls squarely in the former camp.  From the moment the beautiful hand-drawn menu screen boots up, you can tell the creators truly gave an outstanding effort to give the game a look and personality all its own.  

The game is split mainly between the overworld map and the battle screen, and anyone who has played a fantasy TBS game before (i.e. the aforementioned HOMM games, Disciples, Warlords, etc.) will immediately be familiar with the setup.  Both of these screens are vibrant and colorful, which is a nice change from the dreary brown and grey palette most games seems to be working with.  Your hero will travel through lush forests, dank caves, small cities, huge castles, gloomy graveyards, and each one is beautifully rendered with an amazing amount of detail.   Wildlife bounds through the forests, enchanted skeleton carvings on the tomb walls writhe and twist, and phosphorescent mushrooms bathe caves in a eerie glow.  The fully controllable, 360 degree camera allows you to zoom in for a close look, or pull out for an overhead view.  I do wish the camera would pull back a bit further to provide a wider view, but that’s really a minor gripe.  They truly did an amazing job creating the overworld, and I always looked forward to moving into a new area simply so I could see what new tricks the artists had up their sleeves.   Shops and NPC’s dot the landscape, and each has a quest to give or a story to tell through basic dialog boxes.  These interactions are generally well written, and a few of them are pretty funny, but you will encounter the occasional awkward translation and quite a few typos.

When you come in contact with an enemy on the overhead map, the scene shifts to a standard hex-based battle grid.  Your army is lined up on one side, your enemy is on the other and you duke it out until one is gone.  Pretty standard stuff for this genre.   The static backgrounds maintain the wonderful graphics and detail from the world map, but unfortunately the units themselves don’t fare quite as well.  They’re not awful, mind you, but most of the units are quite blocky, the textures are lower res, and a some of the animations are awkward.    Fortunately, there is a huge variety of creature types for both friend and foe, which makes up for any shortcomings in the animation department.

One other thing to note.  Those with ancient dinosaur gaming systems (like me) will be happy to know that King’s Bounty scales extremely well to older hardware.  The game looked beautiful and ran without a single hiccup or frame rate issue on my 2+ year old system.

The sound work in King’s Bounty is solid but not spectacular.  While each area has its own musical theme, there’s nothing particularly memorable and they tend to quickly fade into the background.  There are a few sounds effects on the world map (whooshes and dings when hitting experience pillars, horse hooves clomping on cobblestones, etc.) which are perfectly adequate.  Each unit has individual attack sounds in combat, and there was nothing that stood out as particularly good or particularly bad.  The audio gets the job done, but it’s clear the bulk of the development efforts went into the graphics first.  It was also quite odd that the voice-over for the opening narration didn't come close to matching what was actually written out on screen.  Makes watching the intro sequence a bit awkward.

The player takes control of a single hero (and his trusty steed) on the world map.  Controlling said hero is a breeze:  simply left click on any spot and he’ll travel there.  Clicking directly on enemies will initiate combat, and moving close to a mob will cause them to give chase.   Making a baddie chase you around is a great way to move them out of the way so you can access treasure or items on the world map without engaging in combat. Interacting with buildings, shops, and NPC’s is as simple as clicking on them to open up the dialog boxes, and all interactions are very streamlined and easy to understand.  I was never left wondering how to accomplish an in-game task, even without reading a manual or doing any sort of tutorial.

Controlling units during combat is also very simple.  Each unit’s possible movement is highlighted on the hex grid, and you simply click on a hex to move them there and choose to either attack, defend, cast a spell, or wait.  While your hero doesn’t actively participate in battles, you do have the ability to toss in spells.  Spells are chosen from an easily accessible spell-book, and can range from simple healing or quickness spells to powerful nukes that can quickly decimate an opposing army.  I wasn’t crazy about the lack of a visible turn order, but you adjust to it pretty quickly.   Overall, the controls for both overworld and combat are solid, intuitive, and easy to use.

Kings Bounty offers the choice of playing as three fantasy staples:  a Warrior that focuses on recruiting hordes of powerful troops but is weak in magic, a Mage that is exactly the opposite of the Knight, and a Paladin that provides a good balance between troops and magic.  Each class requires a very different style of play, so players will want to consider their particular style before deciding on a character.  Once you have chosen your profession (and have stopped laughing at their romance novel-esque character portraits), you can choose to either go through a short tutorial sequence, or simply be thrown out into the world to seek your fortune. 

The story revolves around a kingdom, an aging king, some sort of great evil that has brought forth all manner of nasty beasties, and a hero (you) that is apparently the only person who can fix it all.  Frankly, the story was so full of cheese and pulp-fantasy cliche that I begain to completely ignore it about midway through.  It is easily the weakest area of the game.  There are hundreds of quests to complete, but nearly all of them boil down to "talk to this person", "take magic bauble X to that wizard", or some combination of the two.  With no real narrative to back it up, all the quests start to blur together and simply serve as a excuse to wander around and get into fights.

Thankfully, the gameplay is solid enough that you won't miss the lack of a good tale.  From the moment you enter the overworld, you'll be presented with a million and one things to do, treasures to find, caves to explore, and damsels to rescue.  It's worth noting that King's Bounty does not use a turn based system on the overworld map. While this was a bit strange at first, I quickly grew to love it. Your character is free to move about the map at will and is not limited to how many steps he can take before ending a turn. It really opens the game up for exploration and gives it a traditional RPG feel that other games in this genre do not have.

Keeping track of all this exploration, however, can be a bit daunting.  While the map screen initially looks very detailed, it neglects to mark anything but the most major landmarks.  If you don't have the memory of an elephant, you will quickly learn to make great use of the map notes tool to mark the locations of NPC's, shops, troop recuruiting locations, caves...basically anything you think you may forget about in the next 5 minutes.  There is also a journal system to track quests, but I found many of the hints to be incredibly vague and unhelpful if you happened to forget where you were supposed to go or what you were tasked to do.

You develop your hero through 3 seperate skill trees:  Might, Mind, and Magic.  While most players will choose to stick to the one that most closely mirrors their character class (Warrior, Paladin, or Mage, respectively), you are certainly free to level up cross-class skills for each character.   If you want your Knight to be able to throw down fireballs, simply drop a few runes (the currency used for levelling skills) into that particular line.  Spells will never be as effective as the mage since the base stats aren't as high, but it is nice to have that sort of trick up your sleeve.  It allows a significant amount of freedom to develop your hero how you want. 

In your travels you will encounter all manner of castles, hunters, trappers, or demons that will be willing to sell you troops.  Your hero has a pool of leadership points, and each troop requires a certain amount of those points.  It's an excellent system that keeps a good balance between the uber-powerful units and hordes of cannon fodder.  As you level up, pick up Leadership flags on the map, or purchase specific skills, that Leadership pool will increase and you will gain the ability to recruit additional troops.  The huge variety of units available for purchase offers even more customization to your King's Bounty experience.  Do you create an army of mainly ranged units, pump up your spells, and pick off your enemy from afar?   Or do you recruit heavy hitting melee units, increase their armor and resistance, and level your enemy in close combat?  Toss in a special ability or two from each unit, and you are truly free to be creative in how you approach the game.  Of course, each creature has a finite number of recruitable units, so you'll need to mix in a bit of strategy on when and how to deploy your troops in order to be successful.  Throw away too many of your powerful units at the beginning, and you'll have a hard time getting past the more difficult fights.

And fight you will.  Very seldom will you go more than 5-10 minutes without getting into a battle with an opposing army.  While combat initially looks very simple, there is a significant amount of depth underneath.  Most battles end up being strategic affairs that will require thoughtful deployment, movement, and managment of your troops around the hex battle grid in order to succeed.  The basics are the same as we've seen before in countless turn-based strategy games, and there's a reason for this - it's still fun.  All the hex-based genre standards apply:  each unit has a certain amount of action points to use per turn, obstructed attacks do less damage, attacking from behind does more damage, etc. etc.   However, learning how to most effectively use the particular strengths and special abilities of each unit will take some time.

You'll need to learn quickly though, as King's Bounty will hit you with tough fights early and often, and will provide a hefty challenge to even the most seasoned RPG gamers.   Thankfully, right-clicking will display the relative strength of your foe and help you to gauge how good the result will be for your side.    Not making use of this feature can be disastrous, as the penalties for retreating can be stiff.  Unfortunately, there is no way to auto-resolve combat, so even if you are far more powerful than the army you are fighting, you'll still need to go through the motions.  This can get extremely tedious towards the end of each area, when you are at a significantly higher level than most of your opponents.  There's no possible way you can lose, but you will still have to complete the full battle.

King's Bounty is a fairly lengthy game.  It will probably take most players somewhere around 30 hours to complete the main quest, and you could easily spend another 20 doing the optional side quests.  However, it does feel like some of the game's length is a bit padded simply because you have to manually fight through a ton of meaningless battles that you will obviously win.  There is no multiplayer to speak of, so once you're done, you're done. King's Bounty came out of nowhere and has secured a place as one of my favorite titles of the year on PC or console.  While it isn't without flaws, I had an absolute blast with this game.  If you're at all a fan of fantasy turn based strategy games such as HOMM or Disciples, King's Bounty should be a required purchase.  Some gamers may bemoan the lack of a city management aspect, but I found both the overworld and combat mechanics to be so solid, strategic, and challenging that I didn't really miss it.    The charming graphics, deep gameplay, and huge variety of both hero and army customization add up to far more than the sum of their parts.  It's a shame this title didn't get more marketing and publicity, as it really is a fantastic gem.   Check it out, I can guarantee you won't regret it.

Gaming Trend Score

87

1. Graphics: 91
2. Audio: 79
3. Controls: 92
4. Gameplay: 87
5. Value/Replay: 87
6. OVERALL:87