King's Bounty - Review @ IGN

Reviews for King's Bounty have been a little slow to come out but IGN has posted their critique, with a score of 8.1/10:

You're going to be spending a lot of time in combat and, fortunately, that's a good thing. The turn-based battling system in King's Bounty is fantastic. At its core, the combat is simple, yet extremely deep. Like Might and Magic, skirmishes take place on flat, small, hex grids. While your chosen hero will not participate directly in battle, you'll be able to utilize summons and spells to turn the tides of war. Your army typically starts out on the left side of the grid, while your enemies are situated on the right. Each character type is allowed to move a certain number of spaces. Think of it like chess.

In addition, certain classes have different advantages. Archers can kill enemies from a distance, mages can cast defensive/offensive spells, robbers can teleport, knights excel at melee attacks, and so forth. To add to the depth, all of these classes have the ability to learn new, specialized skills. However, having more and stronger troops will not always ensure victory. It is also important to keep track of the terrain. Your surroundings will favor certain unit types over others. Demons have a higher defense on lava levels, the undead get a morale boost for fighting in cemeteries and so on. Tactically, levels with narrow passageways will funnel melee units into a potential death trap. Then there are also the grids that have obstacles like bee nests, which attack either side indiscriminately. Conversely, the battlefield sometimes has chests filled with gold, items, and spells. Having to factor all of this with the enemy's ability to counter attack provides a lot situational obstacles to overcome. While the combat is simple, there's something here for the micromanager in all of us

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More information.

Downloaded KB from Atari thru Digital River. The serial that was supposed to unlock the game didn't work. No response from DR's customer service. Atari's CS pointed back at DR. Very frustrating. Waiting for DR to respond I downloaded the only patch I could find -- the one on the Russian site (http://www.kingsbounty.ru/patches.php). Voila -- it worked on the English version and as a bonus unlocked the game! Didn't have time to go past the training mission, but it looks like everything works just fine.

I disagree with some points on the review, I would score it 8.5.
The author mentioned that there should be a place where you can buy all the armies, I disagree. Part of the simulation is to use the armies available in each area. Like, after a while of being in the dwarves realm, I parked my archers and recruited cannoneers, and parked my griffins and recruited cyclops for example. I'm about to park my swordsmen and get dwarves. Otherwise you'd just use the same armies everywhere, I think it is better how they did it.
The author also complained that he only found out that he could write notes in the map a long time after he started, and that the tutorial should mention it... hello? Did he even read the map where it says you can leave notes? I think the tutorial was just fine. My only problem with the tutorial was how it sort of made you think your actions would determine your 'title', but (at least as far as I have checked) no matter what you do, you'll always be the Treasure Searcher (or whatever).
But at least he didn't give it a low score

That's very interesting about allegiance and area armies, i know the troop morale is affected by "mixed company" varying denominations alien to the king actually lower overall combat stat effectiveness. Therefore i suspect there must be a bonus for loyalty, i would employ kings army and allies denominations only for as long as possible and no matter how difficult the combat.
I noticed while playing the demo that the winning side can keep troop losses to a minimum by effective tactical combat strategy resulting very little troop top-up which means the troop quota for that area will not be completely depleted.
In other words...battling too quick or haphazardly and using up available area troop quota's resulting in having to employ non-aligned recruits will see the troop effectiveness go from bad to worse and possibly loose any (long term consequence?) gains/rewards....i could be completely wrong!
....but i doubt it.

so far I haven't seen any of my troops above 'neutral', maybe because I've always had some sort of animals in my army (ancient bears have been there since I was like lvl 5, now I'm lvl 16).
As you complete certain quests some recruitment centers replenish their armies, and in some cases turn to infinite recruits, so you really won't ever run out of armies. You may run out of the specific unit you like, like I love my shamans, so every time one dies a tear falls down my cheek. Still over 200 left where I got them from though

Have you heard about this new RPG where you roam around a daft fantasy world? You take on jobs, get married, undertake quests and decide whether you want to carry them out properly, betray people, amass enormous fortunes - there's a remarkable amount of freedom, and it all becomes devilishly addictive as you promise yourself that, yes, you really will switch if off as soon as you see what's over the next hill.

But aha, if you just reached for Fable II, then stop it at once! Because through cunning misdirection, I've disguised the fact I'm discussing King's Bounty: The Legend instead. Clever me. It's a sort of sequel-remake to the 1990 wandering role-player that helped spawn the Heroes of Might & Magic series, and it's pure happenstance that it's landed at the same time as Lionhead's headline-grabber. Provided you're not dogmatically devoted to the lure of blockbustery third-person adventuring though, you'll find King's Bounty offers a richer and more diverse experience than the land of Albion ever could. It's also certifiably barking mad.

You're a knight in service to King Mark the Wise of Darion. Following a brief training session, which has more to do with determining your character type than explaining anything else, you're set loose in a lush fantasy realm and pretty much left to fend for yourself. Everything is viewed from a rotatable and zoomable aerial view, and you clip-clop around the scenery with the mouse.

Right from the start, there's a lot to see and do. Items litter the pathways and roads of Darion, while almost every building and character has some sort of task, quest or mission they'd like you to tackle. It is, of course, entirely up to you who benefits from your services - or you can just ignore them all and trot around, finding stuff. Your official title is Royal Treasure Hunter after all. Nobody said you had to share all your loot with the King.

This sounds like a prelude to spam...

Yep, sounds like paid posting to me--little does he know he's preaching to the choir.

I just really think about how much I hate numeric scores every time I hit these reviews. For me there is no doubt that King's Bounty is certainly better than other 2008 releases like Fallout 3 and GTA IV yet doesn't even register for many folks because it gets scored 'fairly' rather than the 9-10 scale used for those.

Is it better or just different? They all are totally different in what they do TXA hard to rate which is better in that sense.

Dhruin said:

This sounds like a prelude to spam...

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No, it ain't.

It's a direct quote:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/kings-bounty-the-legend-review?page=1

i was gonna say, that sounded really familiar!

Alrik Fassbauer said:

No, it ain't.

It's a direct quote:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/kings-bounty-the-legend-review?page=1

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Uh huh. So someone joins the forum to quote a positive review without any contextualising explanation? We already know King's Bounty. This is either a paid post or a prelude to spam.

Which one, Gary?

Dhruin said:

Uh huh. So someone joins the forum to quote a positive review without any contextualising explanation? We already know King's Bounty. This is either a paid post or a prelude to spam.

Which one, Gary?

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Viral marketing? His other post is a bit weird too.

Hm, could be we're seeing the first release of an really sophisticated spam bot.

Remember this post of mine ? http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showpost.php?p=103847&postcount=12

Hey, could be worse than spambots advertising games we already like, I suppose.

txa1265 said:

I just really think about how much I hate numeric scores every time I hit these reviews. For me there is no doubt that King's Bounty is certainly better than other 2008 releases like Fallout 3 and GTA IV yet doesn't even register for many folks because it gets scored 'fairly' rather than the 9-10 scale used for those.

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Ain't that the truth.

It is what it is, tho'. I don't really like scoring systems, period, but institutions like MetaCritic revealed the wonky rating logic to the fullest, only to attach some odd legitimacy to them. Bleh.

I kinda like GTAIV on my PS3 now that it doesn't crash.

rune_74 said:

Is it better or just different? They all are totally different in what they do TXA hard to rate which is better in that sense.

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Well, GTA for PC was technically a disaster to the point of being basically unplayable. Rating it about 75% is unfathomable ... unless they were not really scoring the PC version. Fallout 3 ... well, you know my thoughts ...

So while I agree with the 'different' thing, and also that two of the three games I mention are worth buying (GTA is already widely recognized as perhaps THE most overrated game of 2008), I do feel like the inherent major site bias in scoring 'big money advertiser games' screw gems like King's Bounty.

Brother None said:

It is what it is, tho'. I don't really like scoring systems, period, but institutions like MetaCritic revealed the wonky rating logic to the fullest, only to attach some odd legitimacy to them. Bleh.

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Absolutely agree - which is why I really love the sites I work for that have no numeric scoring - just a simple Buy / Try / Skip, or no rating at all.

The editor at another site and I got into a debate about the merits of FF VII Crisis Core for PSP, with him citing it as 'top 10 psp' ... based on a meta-site, and me showing how the two big meta-sites put it at #30 and #44 respectively ... and how it shows how useless the scores were - and we had a nice chuckle. It is a good game with plenty of flaws, isn't that enough to know?