King's Bounty - Previews @ Gamespot, Gamespy

magerette

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Two more big sites have put up previews of the strategy/rpg King's Bounty:The Legend from 1C and Katauri. The first is at Gamespot:
We played through several hours of a demo version of King's Bounty and are pleased to report that fans of the old-school turn-based role-playing game should enjoy the familiar gameplay mechanics as well as a few new surprises. First we chose a mage from the three preset classes. There are no immediate player-customization options, but you will equip a number of items as well as pick and choose your way through skill trees moving forward. The mage specializes in magic, the warrior in combat, and the paladin dabbles in both.
And Gamespy adds their bit:
At the risk of parroting one of the reviews posted on the official King's Bounty site, it is indeed clear that some high-grade, heartfelt work went into creating the game. It has the unmistakable sheen of a game that someone truly cares about -- evidently a real labor of love, and despite the super-earnest fantasy corniness, it's difficult not to appreciate it. A localized version of the game is supposed to come out sometime this year, to be published by Atari, so look for more impressions soon.
More information.
 
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I played the Russian Version. It's a really fun game. Think HoMM3 without taking turns and no AI kingdom acting against you. You run restricted by the enemy stacks. This may make it sound easy, but its actually pretty hard. You'll be limited by how many troops you can recruit by your 'Leadership' rating. You get more Leadership by finding small flags on the game map (usually protected by an enemy stack) or getting promotions by the king for completing series of Main Quests. So your army never gets that big even when you have tonns of Cash later in the game. Also the amount of troops you can recruit is also limited. For example your Capitol may let you recruit 100 archers from it. So even if your leadership allows you to have 150 archers in your army you'll only be able to get 100 from your capitol, and will have to find the rest elsewhere. And if you lose some you won't be able to get any more from your capitol. This will make you try to concerve your troops, especially ones that aren't offered for sale often. Even if you lose 1-2 of each type of troop in every battle, you'll have to spend 5-10 minutes running around to all the different buildings where you can replenish them after you start getting low on those troops. For example, run to the capitol to get more Priests, then run to one of the Mage towers to get ArchMagi, then run to the Marshes to get two different types of EvilEyes. And finally take a swim to Pirate Isles to replenish Giants if you somehow lost 1 or 2.

The game is random every time, so often you won't see the same troops being sold from the same locations each run. This can make some play-throughs harder then others.

Only bad thing I saw was that the repetitive tactical battles do get boring at some point, just like they did in HoMM series. So if you found the repetetive tactical battles in HoMM annoying after a point, you'll likely have the same problem with this game.
 
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Oct 19, 2007
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Looks really cool, (the video at gamespot was awesome) too bad I cant stay awake during a TB game. I might still buy it and break my anti-caffiene stance for 15 hrs
 
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Well, it's only turn based during the combat--the overland map is real time, so maybe the torture level would ratchet down 50% at least. :)

This has gone from a maybe to an 'almost definite' for me.
 
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