King's Bounty II

I'm giving up on this game. It is nothing like KB Armored Princess or War of the Orcs. The controls and perspective are uncontrollable. I keep getting the heroine running right into the camera. The way to rotate the camera is with the mouse and making several swipes with it, which is very slow. You have to use the keyboard to move the character and the mouse at the same time for rotating. Really hard to work and not worth the trouble. I read someone said the KB 1 and Armored Princess were cartoony graphics. I think they were beautiful and bright and gorgeous. I loved the way you could just point the mouse in the direction you wanted the character to go and off she went. KB 2 is just too difficult to get anywhere I want to go.

Everything about his game is just that. Nothing really stands out. The graphics are mediocre, UI is awfully console-ish, the amount of available units in the game is painfully low, story is generic. I mean, it plays fine, but don't expect anything groundbreaking both either fun factor or gameplay. The game is also a save/load simulator due to some extremely cheap fights. Most arenas are extremely small, where enemy units can decimate your army before you even get to your first turn. The game's initiative system is AI biased so if some units have the same initiative/speed, AI always gets to go first. The only thing you can do to mitigate this is the initial unit placement, which will usually require several tries to see what the AI does and how it plays that particular fight. Losing units is extremely detrimental as some of them are extremely expensive and you can very easily run out of gold if you are too frugal with it. You can lose troops (you get to heal them for 50% of the cost after battle), but entire units usually means reload unless it's a particularly tough fight. You will also be reloading if the enemy gets lucky morale/crit/dodge streaks. With that said, the amount of actual fights in the game is surprisingly low. Most of the time will be spent running around and talking to people, which is not a good thing. The quests and main story are uninteresting. Your options for some solutions are "HURR DURR ME FIGHT STUF", "I will do this just because it's evil and no other reason", "Goody two-shoes" and "I'm smart". The saddest thing for me is honestly the music. It has been stellar in the previous KB entries, but here is is some of the most generic stuff I've ever heard. There are exactly 2 extremely repetitive combat tracks that play in every fight and the whole soundtrack besides the menu music is entirely forgettable. A stark difference to the masterpieces in the Legend-Dark Side line of games. Still, it can be fun in some aspects, so giving it a 6.5/10.

The heart of the game - the tactical turn-based battles - is a solid and challenging endeavor. Unfortunately the bulk of your time will be running around in a 3D world picking up scattered loot and running back and forth for pretty linear quests. The effort made towards spotty voice actors, world/lore building, attractive third person scenery, and uneven writing could have been much better spent in crafting more battles. Controls can be clunky. The learning curve is steep, and unforunately there's no way to see how spells and units will level up. The skill tree is poorly balanced and resources are finite, so that you can get well into a game (I only played on normal levels) and realize that battles have become too difficult and you've wasted your gold/mana on the wrong things. The story has some limited black/white choices which are between Order/Anarchy and Power/Finese. Puzzles for the most part are laughably easy. If you subject yourself to the game, some tips: Easier to explore on foot - only use the horse for travelling over You can only max out Order OR Anarchy, as well as Power OR Finese in your skill alignment. The XP talents are worth it as battles are very limited. It's easy to miss scrolls and pouches of gold, but your map will show those that you walked by Pick your spells judiciously. Some spells are way better than others (I discovered Blindness later in the game which helped shut down tough units). Note that Mana is used both to learn spells and cast spells during battle.

It might not be the classic King's Bounty game we know and love but on its own it is still a fun a good turn based RPG. The units look pretty good in this game,and the graphics overall are also really nice. I'm a big fan of turn based RPGs and I'm enjoying this game alot.

I'm not playing on console. And this IS a console game. This should NOT be sold as a PC game. You will simply not be able to move around with your keyboard and mouse. Everything is so clumsy. Probably with a console controller everything is different. I can say. It probably is a good game, but I have no idea because I simply couldn't play it. Gave it a nostalgic 2* for the marvels that were the previous versions.