King's Bounty: Dark Side - Premium Edition

I loved Crossworlds, one of my favorite games. Dark Side is fantastic until about level 30. Then it becomes horrible. I didn't bother to finish the game. All fights become easy but still long (the worst combination), the quests are boring, the storyline is pointless. I wish they had just made a smaller game. Then I would have given it 5 stars. It feels as though they ran out of time or money. What a shame.

SUMMARY: it's like a turbo-charged King's Bounty the Legend with most of the not-fun segments removed (no fillery marriage quests or arena battle tests). The same The Engine is used and the system reqs are low. Don't buy the Premium Edition if you want value, since it only adds a tiny amount of sub-par SIDE content to the game ). I played 100 + 60 hours completionist style (standard + premium -- the standard repair installation turned the Premium Edition into an extra buggy Standard one, had to reinstall the upgrade also). About 90 % of the generated items in stores are COMPLETELY RANDOM. This means unless you mess around to generate useful items, at worst you can get ones that are total garbage (*cough Lizardmen gear w/ any lizard units available cough*). The few useful items are almost always of the Artifact slot, which you have only one, at least on the demon chick. What you do have is a ton of Regalia item slots with almost nothing to equip into. In short, you end up skipping most of the items and going. Even your companions have mostly Regalia slots. On the other hand, your dude starts with almost +30 bonuses to DEF and ATK, so that +3 ATK sword that was top-tier in Legend, is quite useless here. TBF, some Legend items are in the random pool, e.g. the Rahha Shield w/ -50% dragon damage. Most of the content involves the quests. There are much less enemies roaming around the place than in Legend, so it is not a massive project to sweep the place for that supremely vital EXP. Stacking EXP bonus items and skills easily breaks the game. Got to lvl 86 that way (80 gives the "Max Level" achievement, LOL). Overall, the game is a bit spotty implementation-wise, but it works. As per the Russian game stereotype, quicksave before you do anything to see if you get screwed or not and continue once you don't. BTW, the Snow White char in the cover is a Carmilla who makes you kill "Gang of Seven" (dwarves) TWICE. Enjoyable. About 140+ quests. Premium is not worth it.

Going to mainly go into detail about the bonuses of the Premium Edition compared to the normal one. - You get 2 somewhat brief islands to explore. They are much shorter than the locations of the original game, but offer additional fights, items, gold and even a couple of inter-connected quests. - The Clot of Darkness item you get near the start of the game. The store description is wrong, it gives a 5% bonus to XP earned and 5% bonus to leadership. Due to the percentage based leadership bonus, the item maintains relevance throughout the entire game (unlike most other bonus items from other games which are useless after 2 hours of playing). And the XP bonus if course a big boon too. It will provide a distinct advantage over the non-premium edition. - A single new unit and an opportunity to improve one of the existing units. - You also get the opportunity to gather more items to turn in for one of the most complex quests in the game, which asks you to gather paintings of Netana's women. To complete the quest, you need to gather 10 of them, which is only possible when playing as the Demoness (as she gets a portrait of herself) without premium edition. The other characters can only gather 9. The premium adds 4 more paintings to gather, making the quest solvable with the other 2 characters and you can also turn in the left over ones elsewhere for an additional reward. And as for the game itself, I consider it the 2nd best King's Bounty after Legend. If you've played anything between Legend and this, you know exactly what to expect. If you liked them, you will like this one. If you did not, this game won't change that. Really enjoyed playing as the dark creatures. All of them also get a decent amount of unique dialogue options (and even quest solutions), depending on who you play as and some NPC react to you differently. Yes, it's just written dialogue, but still a nice touch. As a King's Bounty enjoyer, this is an easy 9/10.

... except without any navigation aid. Feels like a KB game. However, the quest design is so bland. Much of it is just running around fetching stuff. Way too many quests provide few or no clues, as to where a player should go to obtain a requested item. It's as if someone intentionally created these quests in order to waste as much player's time (and patience) as possible. The game feels very long, because it's padded with too much running back and forth, or with clueless running around searching for something. Looking up quest guides online significantly reduces the time spent doing these chores, but it feels like I'm just using spoilers to actually enjoy whatever good aspects remain in the game. It reminded me of some cliché MMO quests (and not in a good way), but those usually had some pointers, as to where I should go and what I should do there. The game feels filled with too much cheap and lazy filler, possibly to cut down on development costs.