

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.