King's Bounty: Crossworlds GOTY

Well, I will spoil all the joyful, positive comments on this game with my more critical one. First of all, the game is nothing more than a stand alone add-on to the main game with some additional units. If you know the main game you will see myriads of copy passed mechanics and tactics. Graphics are nice at the beginning but the longer I played the more annoying they became. I find "extra" dynamic animations during the combat the most annoying and you cannot turn them off. Now the gameplay. I played with a mage in the main campaign a in this scenario. In both cases at the beginning you must be careful what you attack and must scavenge all, runes, leadership flags and so on avoiding tougher opponents. This is actually the only part of the game where I had much fun. Later on when you get biffed up and start recruiting Trolls/Cyclops/Dragons/Giants/Demonologists /Paladins/T-rexes you steamroll everything without losses. And all this regardless if the game says "easy" or "lethal" opponent. It happens somewhere between 25 and 30 level. This is the moment where battles start to look the same and the game gets really booooooring... . Yes, the game is terribly unbalanced. One might say that it gives numerous alternative strategies with hordes of various units, special abilities and spells but in reality it boils down to kill kill kill, resurrect, resurrect, resurrect, end, 0 units lost... . I guess the greatest issue in the game is that you have a limited supply of various units and you are forces to pick those that you can maxed out (well, THE original King's Quest was like that so no surprise here). Another issue is totally unbalances spelling system. I think I was typically using not more than 7-10 spells out of 50 or so... One might ask, but what about the story in the game? My answer would be: What story? A player is confronted with text containing some quest important information warped in a load of unnecessary rubbish and all this just to click "yes I accept the quest" or "no I do not" (If you are lucky, because most of the quests are so linear that you have no choice at all). Consequently I was diligently reading a first couple of "dialogs" and after that just clicked yes yes yes and was reading the quest description in the logbook... . You can try to immerse yourself in the story (if you have that much much time) or do it my way skipping all the the fillers.

IT ALL DEPENDS ON YOUR GAMEPLAY PREFERENCES. It is still exact same kind of content variation here, i.e. narration through convobox walls-of-text. It tries to change things up from the previous Legend, though the variation does not go much further than the text blocks and an occasional sight of new textures, portraits and character models. In fact it is not that much better than the phone-in-job of the series (Warriors of the North). Nothing significant has changed. It is difficult to state any demonstrable improvements or even changes from Legends or how it supposedly beats WOTN. Frankly, the games between Legend and Dark Side should not have happened (read: Legend clones). Dark Side changed things and incorporated new and better ways to do play, e.g. teleporting, auto-recruiting and adding a hub worth revisiting. I can see attempts at freshening things with Officer's Patent, though it is clearly deliberate and involves going through the same old text-block-rich convobox stuff. Here's the contents: 1) the old Armored Princess main campaign (has Mac support, "that's why included"), 2) The Arena one i.e. a bossbattle gauntlet short enough to speed run in a 3 hours, 3) Defender one (max 2h long with half a dozen special trap battles) and 4) the Orcs the March expanded main camp (NOTE: with no Mac support according to a dev). In practice, anything besides #4 is a waste of time and even #4 is only differently written than Legend, the core gameplay is still the same. The Legend one was already stretching the limits of boredom. I noticed that most of the time in 1C KB games is taken up by 1) textboxes and 2) fights. I'd already spent 2h until competing the tutorial dungeon and the couple fights, mostly because of the big text boxes. Later, the fights will hog a big chunk of your time, because the autobattle requires certain late-game units to be usable. And the game makes progressing there super slow. E.g. kill 50 snakes, get 23 exp when you need 200. How annoying.

Really good start, kinda fizzles out towards the end. And the sexism is really bewildering sometimes.

I love this series but i sciped Armored princes yers ago , to be honest idk why :) Now im playing with passion as always for this seires, I do reomend to try this game even after years.

Nice old game. Rich world, rich in creatures with a good combat system. Very relaxing.