King's Bounty: The Legend

Release Date: September 23, 2008

King's Bounty: The Legend Review

Don't overlook this under-the-radar strategy game.

Having never played 1989's original release of King's Bounty, I was told to expect a Heroes of Might and Magic type of experience from its successor, King's Bounty: The Legend. To my surprise, upon booting up the game, it appeared as if I had stumbled across a typical hack-and-slash RPG. What primarily threw me off was the isometric over-the-shoulder camera angle. While the game initially looked like a Diablo clone, King's Bounty is actually an entirely different, yet familiar experience.

As is typical with most RPGs, you will traverse across maps full of villages, monsters, friendly non-playable characters, and shops. As your journey begins, you are asked to choose amongst three different classes: warrior, paladin, or mage. I chose the paladin because I thought it would give me a decent mix of the warrior's might and the mage's magic. While roaming around the world, you can see rival armies represented with walking avatars. You can engage in battle with your foes by walking up to the avatar and if you get to close, they'll attack you.

However, before you hastily enter battle, you've got to understand your odds. Like most RPGs, you can view attributes like defense, attack, magic and more. In your "hero" submenu, you can upgrade three different types of abilities through tech trees. Might allows you to upgrade strength attributes, Magic grants you more powerful spell abilities, and Mind lets you gain things like money and experience at a faster rate. In addition to your troops' basic abilities, you will later be able to summon four different types of monsters. Like most RPGs, you will be able to purchase things like armor and gear from various shops. However, unlike most RPGs, there are no traditional health potions to buy. You'll instead strengthen your forces by purchasing more troops. Your army can consist of up to five different class types. While you can only have five different unit types at any one time, as you fight and gain more leadership points, your squad cap for each unit increases. This allows you to increase the density of units, which in turn gives you the opportunity to bolster the strength of your individual classes. For instance, five barbarians will hit harder than three, and so on.

In case you were wondering, yes, there are giant turtles.

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.

After you win a battle, you may be dismayed to know that your dead troops don't come back to life. Instead you must purchase more troops to fill in your ranks. While victory may still bring you casualties, retreating from battles isn't a wise strategy either. Running away causes you to sacrifice many of your troops on the battlefield. If you're scared of battling enemies, you can set the combat to autopilot mode, but this option is pretty worthless against strong foes, as your offensive AI will often get you killed.

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Game Details

Published by: Atari
Developed by: Katauri Interactive
Genre: RPG
Release Date:
United States: September 23, 2008
UK: Q3 2008
MSRP: 39.99 USD
T for Teen : Drug Reference, Language, Mild Fantasy Violence
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