King's Bounty: The Legend Review

Description :

King's Bounty: The Legend is a Real-time / Turn-based Strategy with RPG elements. In a fairy tale fantasy world of fearless knights, evil mages, wise kings and beautiful princesses the player controls a hero. Leading their character through the game world, exploring it, commanding armies in battle and accomplishing various quests can mean great reward or huge defeats.

Actually, about the only fair negative comment you could make about King's Bounty is that there isn't really anything new here. Just about everything feels like a rip-off of Heroes of Might and Magic. As with that long-lived Ubisoft franchise, the core of this game is all about taking on the role of a hero in a solo campaign (there is no multiplayer option) and guiding parties of mercenaries across a real-time map to fight turn-based battles on hex grids. A strong RPG flavor is granted through character creation, which allows you to choose from warrior, paladin, and mage classes and then trick out your avatar with skills, artifacts, weapons, armor, spells, and assorted other Gygaxian accoutrements. You then explore the huge medieval fantasy world of Darion in the service of King Mark the Wise, plying the trade of a treasure hunter. A story slowly develops regarding the king's older brother and the standard evil threat to the continued existence of, well, everything, although you don't have to pay much attention to it. Essentially, you just wander around doing good deeds, guiding an icon of your hero through the usual D&D-inspired landscape to slay monsters, loot treasure, scoop up skill runes, mana crystals, and leadership banners, and solve quests handed out by your king and various passersby.

Despite that description, this isn't a hack-and-slasher. Instead of whaling on monsters with a small party of adventurers as in the typical RPG, you wage tactical battles with veritable armies of troops on turn-based battlefields. Mages, priests, knights, archers, monsters, and the like are hired at special buildings such as the king's castle for use as shock troops in your hero's party. You start off with a paltry handful of these goons, but soon wind up at the head of a tremendous force of killer Renaissance fair refugees. Stuff enough gold into your pantaloons and increase your hero's leadership skill as you increase in level and you'll be able to afford the services of loads of hirelings. The scale of battles always remains manageable, however, as each unit type is depicted by just a single character model on the battlefield no matter how many of those units you actually command. This keeps the focus on pure tactics and allows you to whip through battles lickety-split, while still letting you make use of each unit's special abilities. As just about every unit comes with some sort of skill involving spells or bonus attacks, cutting to the chase without dealing with hordes of units is vital to keeping the game straightforward and simple.

Difficulty is also scaled well. Starting off on easy knocks down monster hit points to something quite manageable, and cranks up the amount of gold awarded so that you never seem to run out of the coin needed to hire reinforcements. It's gratifying to see newbies getting let in on the action like this; too many games of this ilk seem to want to punish players, or at least present such a grueling level of difficulty that only veterans of the genre need apply. With that said, moving to normal difficulty is one heck of a leap. Enemy hit points take a huge jump and your gold gets slashed to practically nothing, turning what was a pretty fast-moving game into what can be a grueling slog through battles of attrition.


The Good

* Solid gameplay based on a traditional tactical RPG formula
* Good turn-based tactical depth
* Strong RPG flavor and storyline
* Colorful graphics evocative of old-time role-playing.


The Bad

* Not much in the way of innovation
* No multiplayer.


System Requirement

Minimum system requirement:

* OS:Windows XP/Windows Vista
* Processor:Intel Pentium 4 2.6GHz
* RAM:1GB
* Graphic Card:Nvidia GeFirce 6800/ATI Radeon X800
* VRAM:256MB
* Free Hard Disk Space:5.5GB
* DirectX version:9


Recommended system requirement:

* OS:Windows XP/Windows Vista
* Processor:Intel Pentium 4 3GHz
* RAM:2GB
* Graphic Card:GeForce 7900/ATI Radeon X1900
* VRAM:512MB
* Free Hard Disk Space:5.5GB
* DirectX version:9