King's Bounty: Dark Side

No matter how hard I tried as a veteran of KB: Legend and KB: Armored Princess to love Dark Side, I can recommend this only to the most die-hard fans. The game has quite a refreshing storyline with all that dark army building, Shelter (sort of castle-building first time in KB series), tons of funny one-liners, complicated quests never seen before in a KB game (for example, working with your spy to get inside a castle), new unique units, tons of addictive combat... I loved first four or five areas of KB: Dark Side. But after first few islands it all gets extremely repetitive. You soon realize that quests almost always get overly complicated and long, you don't get any guidance what-so-ever besides the original dialogs with quest givers that is NOT recorded in your journal so if you happened to not pay enough attention you will be searching Google for answers - too many times... Battles are very punishing in the beginning but get laughably easy once you are powerful enough (I am level 59 vampire now and haven't had a challening battle since 40 or so). And on top of all this, KB: Dark Side is absolutely humongous. Seeing as repetitivness is the common trait amongst all KB games I don't understand why the developers insist on pushing these to such lengths. Dark Side is twice the length of KB: AP, at least. When I realize that I am going to spend another 20+ hours going through more and more areas, finding bits and pieces of information on how to beat it on Google (seeing as the quest log is useless) I slowly begin to cringe. This is why I cannot give the game more than 3 stars. I really tried to love it, and I did, for a time, but then boredom and endless grind kicked in. First 10-20 hours are amazing. The rest is a boring mess with occassional brilliant idea thrown into it.

Pretty hard at the start. Wasn't expecting that from a King's Bounty game. Still addicting as usual. I love the dark side. Gonna keep on playing and grinding through. I am becoming better and more powerful every turn. :-) For everybody wondering about a wrong display resolution when starting up the game. Search for the file 'game.ini' in your user folder 'your name\Documents\My Games\Kings Bounty The Dark Side' and change these lines to your desired values: setf ~screenresoultionx .... setf ~screenresoultiony .... and setf ~aspectratiox ... setf ~aspectratioy ... For example, if you want Full HD like me, change it to: setf ~screenresoultionx 1920 setf ~screenresoultiony 1080 setf ~aspectratiox 16 setf ~aspectratioy 9 And you are set. Have fun, gamer!

I avoided this game for a while because of some of the negative reviews. I got it about a month ago for cheap, and have definitely got my money's worth. Hours and hours of play. It's definitely challenging in the beginning as you have no rage capabilities, little in spells and army. Definitely collect the spider and snake eggs and use them to keep part of your army stocked in the beginning. Also, be careful with your money. A couple early quests require a lot of it. Transforming prisoners to troops helps keep costs down, and be prepared to lose and need to restock troops often. As you get stronger, the game gets easier. New rage skills and level up hierarchies. The game is definitely dark. Some of the quests can be not only challenging, but maddening as you need to go back and forth a dozen times with some of them. Teleporting makes travel easier. If you enjoyed the other King's Bounty series, you should enjoy this one as well.

I've played dos, legend, armored princess, crossworld and I'd say Dark side has the more interesting story and writing than the rest, while remaining difficult throughout the game. There are many drawbacks however. Sometimes quests don't give much clue, so you need to write things down rather than read the journal. Then the game is buggy, right now playing I still get bug with metamorph's quest, and there are bound to have many other bugs. The worst problem is not every area is equivalent (questwise), some will just have you fetch around like one of the dwarven city and one of the elf island. They may just give you instructions to collect 4 things or go collect materials then you're bound to fetch things, while in previous island you may have some minor choices and can skip many fights (or forced to fight depend on your character) Game balance wise, the 3 major race orc, undead, and demons are pretty imbalanced, especially orc start with no rage, poor spells, and poor units. There are also no lizard men despite artifacts often mention the race, wish there were dinos along with my orcish army.