King's Bounty: The Legend

Annoying game. This game is kind of similar to Heroes of Might and Magic, however you will spend time on tedious back and forth riding the horse in very uninteresting side quests and refilling your troops between battles. The battles are extremely repetitive. The A1 is not very good so you can easily predict the behavior. The enemy power does not develop with your character, rather a linear presumed progress, so if you do a side quest later in the game it is extremely easy. It is not like HOMM where enemy power increases with every turn. Where HOMM is great, this is just bad. It is however beautifully drawn, and nice animations (but you soon get tired watching the sail ship or flying rocks take you through the game) so if your only interest lies in the programs utilization of your video card, this is the one for you.

Any game has to be designed to grab your attention, pull you in, keep you interested, teach you the ropes, and then once you're hooked set you free. This game fails to do any of that. Terrible UI shows no information on troops of any sort, be it attacks, health, or anything else. Tutorial is pure annoyance with failed humor that teaches you nothing about anything. Controls are downright faulty randomly swinging the camera as you move for no reason. You're thrown into combat with no information and are taught nothing. You loose troops to find you should have raised them before the fight ended as that's all you get for the whole mess of battles to come. It's a complete disaster. If there is somehow a game here worth playing, it's hidden behind far too much bad design, frustration, and confusion to ever be played. I'm at a loss how it has such high ratings when it's a complete no go from the begining.

My first caveat is that I really haven't played this game much. When I tried it, I got frustrated by the difficulty of the enemies and the tedium of the battle system, and wasn't spurred on by the story system enough to play for more than a few hours. The battle system is turn based, and they haven't thought about when you're fighting really easy enemies. Thus, they take almost as long as tough enemies to defeat, making the game painstakingly slow in that regard. Also, as another reviewer has commented, this is supposed to be Good OLD Games, and I'm disappointed to see some very new (my laptop can't even run this!) games creeping on here in what I suspect is an attempt to bump up sales. You have a niche outside of Steam - restored classics to run on modern PCs - please don't ruin that!

The art is good but crowded. Your character only fights in three contrived areas at the start of the game. After that, all battles are performed by troops which you have purchased. Control is kind of clunky as your troops will battle by themselves (probably to the death) without your control. It may be a good "tactical" game among troops BUT it is not an RPG by any stretch of the imagination. My rating reflects my disappointment in my expectations. The game is simple and includes a good deal of "stuff" and you may like building up an Army and going through a story where you are little involved. Elemental is a much better game but not near as pretty. However, it is an actual RPG games. You control the King who can fight in every battle should you so choice and can purchase spells, armor, weapons for him and NPCs.

I don't intend to rate, but every time I start the app, I get a pop-up prompting me to rate, which is very annoying. Although this is not an evaluation of the software itself, I question this kind of evaluation system.