King's Bounty: Warriors of the North

The game is pretty good, with lots of interesting additions to the game, especially with ice and fire DLC. Plus I loved the way you need to manage your troops, you lead a small poor country so you cant always full your army to the limit with all the troops you want, so you cant just crate a universal combos in the game, you will need to change army once or twice. Plus some bosses and quests need you adapt your army in order to win. And pick spells carefully, magic crystals dont lie around in such amounts any more. And the final Battle is quite epic.

I'm continually amused just by the amount of detail the creators put into these Bounty games. You can see squirrels jumping between the trees, find automated saw-mills that aren't part of a quest they're just fun to watch in operation, and of course all the little animations for the many creatures in battle. It's an open world that's enjoyable to just explore, and thankfully there's a lot of buried treasures and hidden resources to find if you do. This game is like Heroes of Might and Magic only instead of base-building you have a single hero riding around collecting allies to join your army against the scattered enemies roaming the map. You undertake quests (there's no voice acting but lots of amusing dialogue to read anyway) and ride around finding objects to boost your stats, gold to buy units, leadership to increase your army capacity, spells to give you an edge. There are TONS of people to talk to and stuff to do and even if a majority of these are fetch quests or 'kill this and come back' missions there's a surprise variety in even these, such as enemies giving you alternate quests or people asking for certain rare creatures to join their own armies. There's just lots of things to do: your character to customize with items and upgrades on a skill tree, there's three different kinds of characters to choose from to begin with their own specific way of tackling the campaign (personal strength, armies, spell caster) and you will end up with a notebook of stuff to do before you even leave the main hub area. If you like turn-based combat, army management, RPG character development, and vikings, this is a fine time.

I'm currently playing through this, 86 hours in, and although it's playable it pales in comparison to the Legend and Armored Princess. Basically it's identical to the previous two entries, but worse in every way: - the lack of play testing is appalling, there are broken quests, bugged events, crashes to desktop, look up the "0 damage bug" for fun; still not fixed, one crash 20 minutes into a long fight was my incentive of writing this as a matter of fact - the graphical engine hasn't changed at all since early 2008 (the Legend release); making this more of a "total conversion mod" or an expansion at best rather than a standalone game - there is an ENORMOUS amount of textual and grammar bugs, to the point where item tooltips cannot be understood or don't make any sense whatsoever - straight from the start the fights are a grind, 40 hours later you're doing the same, 80 hours later you wished it was over; this game is long, and not in a good way - the story is poor, the writing bad, all very predictable until it takes some twists making it all even worse; basically regardless of which 3 class options you choose, you play an idiot protagonist and are forced to play through that idiots ways... you even get reprimanded by NPC's about that numerous times, but unable to do anything about it. I loved the Legend 9/10, I loved Armored Princess 8/10, but this is a piss poor 4/10 for me personally.

I like turn based games as I can think about what my next move will be. The game is colourful and good story.