Royal Bounty - Released

Iosoftware has released Royal Bounty HD - an homage to King's Bounty of New World Computing:

Royal Bounty HD was crafted for the lovers of old adventure RPGs like King’s Bounty (1990). You are an adventurer named Jim, just out of the island prison. How you ended up like this is unknown. You have no gold and no army. Angry Cell Guard is chasing your heels. What a difficult situation! Your first quest is get away from the maze and find a ship. But it is just a beginning of the story. Your road lies across four huge continents, inhabited by a variety of monsters. You are going to visit a desert, frozen lands, go through woods and towns, and in the finale meet your old friend, The Master. En route you’ll have to earn money and gather an army to face him fully equipped. Nevertheless, you will still need a helping hand from Dragons.

• gorgeous, unmatched, top-class pixel art
• true hardcore gameplay like back in the 90’s
• 180 creature types in your army
• long plot featuring several endings
• tons of quests
• well polished user interface

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More information.

I already bought it - the playing style is exactly like King's Bounty or the early HoMM games.

Looks like a rather weak cash grab to me.

But to each his own

From comments:

The way to move is buggy

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Call me when they fix it.

Don't we have like a ton of russian KB's?!

wolfsrain said:

Don't we have like a ton of russian KB's?!

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And that's exactly why a new and fresh KB game would be really welcome. There have been like what, 4 King Bounties (excluding expansion)? And they all play almost exactly alike, with almost the same units, same spells and powers, same graphics. I like the KB type of games, but man is it time for a real update.

Man I love those old school graphics. Pixel me up baby.

joxer said:

From comments:

Call me when they fix it.

Click to expand...

It's not really buggy - the way setting algorithm is a bit rough and could be more elegant. That's all.

So does anyone who has played it have any thoughts? I take it that it's based on the original King's bounty, as opposed to the later remakes. I liked the original a lot when it first came out, but I'm not sure if I'd be interested in playing it now. But if it added some complexity to the formula, or made it more like the newer King's Bounty games, I'd be much more interested. I'm just not sure how much I can really expect for $5.

I have high hopes for this---if you check the developer's website, you'll see how they've been building themselves up, so to speak, over their prior titles to take on something of this venerated level. As well as their next aims in their flagship series to actually take on classic HoMM moreso directly.

Not to say a random indie thing out of nowhere can't succeed at something like this out of the gate, but it is reassuring to see an inching towards the goal over a protracted period of time---bodes well for them sticking it out for the long haul to get it right. Honestly, if more dev attempts went with this method, we'd probably already have the likes of a proper Master of Magic spiritual successor by now as opposed to each sudden lunge out of nowhere and from nothing at the light with World of Magic being just the latest.