King's Bounty: Warriors of the North - Complete Edition

I'm a big fan of the King's Bounty Series but this game is a broken and buggy mess. This is my experience... In the game you meet various valkyrie characters and recruit them to your army. I made the mistake of clicking on the first valkyrie twice when she didn't disappear from the map onto the character screen. I noticed later that she appeared twice on the character screen. When I recruited the last valkyrie the game crashed. The last valkyrie is automatically added after a boss fight so you can't avoid the game crashing. I'd put about 50 hours into the game at this point. Oh well I thought it's just one bug. I'll try again with a different character class. I chose to play as the skold. After the first few battles I had managed to aquire a huge amount of leadership points which would have made all subsequent battles a pushover. This defeats the purpose of the game. As well as the above mentioned problems the text is chock full of spelling mistakes and misplaced line breaks. A few hours with a native English speaker could easily have corrected all this. Until this game is patched (which is unlikely as they've just released another one) I'd give it a miss.

I'm a fan of the King's Bounty reboot franchise. But with this entry in the series, I feel it's quickly running out of steam. This franchise has been reusing various assets so much, that you'd think they'd gotten game development advice from Capcom and SNK. Humans, elves, dragons, orcs, trees, buildings... so many models have been used in all three games (four actually, with “Dark Side” doing the same) with little or no change in them. Even some of the music is from the previous games. And it's this cut and paste technique that's making this franchise feel very long in the tooth. "Warriors of the North" also introduced a rather large amount of game bugs that never got fixed. As an example, during the intros to the islands, you'll get kicked back to the desktop half of the time unless you skip them, and the same crashes happen randomly while you're out exploring or battling. This game also got hit by strange framerate fluctuations that cause the game to slow to a crawl for no apparent reason. As another example, you're in one area on any island and the framerate is fine. You explore for a minute, come back to that same area a minute later without changing maps, and then it's running at about five frames per second with nothing new going on. Then you get to all the questionably translated text that results in poorly written story bits/descriptions/tasks thanks to typos, abilities and effects that don't work like they should, quest bugs that make some quests unable to be finished, graphical glitches... it all just starts getting silly, especially since some of the bugs were introduced with its final patch. Despite all of the gripes, there is some enjoyment to be had. Some of the new spells and characters are fun to use, and the still-solid gameplay is basically identical to the previous two games (so you're all set if you just want more of the same). But this game gets a 60% from me. It's not utterly broken or unplayable, but it's not as good as what preceded it.

I love the King's Bounty franchise. KB: The Legend is still one of my favorite games ever, and I often get the itch to play it, and Crossworlds, again. That being said, Warriors of the North bored me enough that I haven't even finished it. I've been trying to figure out why I feel this way, and it may be that you have to stick with Viking units for most of the time. While the extreme length of the first two were a selling point for me, in WOTN it just makes me not want to finish the game. Just wanted to give a heads up to people.

This series is my all time favorite. WOTN is a less controlled experience than the original KB or Crossworlds. I don't know if that's because they didn't have the money to fine tune the game or because that's what the designers intended. It's obvious that certain aspects of the game were meant to have more polish, such as the quest system and bugs. You have a lot of choice as to which areas to do first so you'll end up being way overpowered at times, especially if you install the DLC. I liked that though. It was fun to watch my summoned phoenix crush an entire army single handed on impossible difficulty. Which brings up another point. Am I getting better at KB or is Crossworlds just a more challenging game? Not sure. Anyhow, WOTN has more elements in it than other KB games. More spells, more units, more areas to explore (although they reused areas from the original KB). Super fun! Looking forward to Dark Side big time. I hope the developers give the game a big time graphical upgrade at some point.