To preface my review I will start off saying that I went into this game expecting it to not be like the earlier King's Bounty games. The original formula had stagnated by the 3rd game. Unfortunately this game is just not good. I tried to like it, but the game does its hardest to make it impossible. It is full of poor design and balance that makes it very obvious that the game was never play tested in any capacity. Once the programming and art were done the game was simply released to the public. No one on the dev team played the game even once because if they had they would've instantly run into the myriad of problems the game suffers from. Simple things like many spells not scaling well and being traps / wastes of mana to learn, upgrade or use. Low level quests need to be completed in areas that are gated behind high level enemies, and by the time you do get there the quest reward is scaled to a low level and ends up being pittance. The way how you unlock new skills via quest choices has a clear bias in the beginning as most quests are of the yellow/green variety, while red/blue have to suffer a dull beginning hoarding their level up points before they unlock the next tier of abilities. Technically the game is also very rough. The horse controls are clunky and I found myself running more just because the controls felt better even if it was slower. Your running animation isn't synced with your run speed. Models look and are animated like animatronics you'd find in a novelty golf course, which is a problem here because you spend so much time zoomed in on them and talking with NPCs. If you spent your time zoomed out it wouldn't matter and probably would look fine like that, but from the more intimate angle it looks horrid. Tried to like the game and with another 1 year of active play testing, rebalancing and technical polish it could've been good. But as it is it's unplayable.
It's a fun game with good mechanics, but I find that the best way to win is to just spam Priests and snipe enemy towers / Shaman with Lightning while your Priests convert the entire enemy tribe. Doing this has always earned me victory, whereas trying to play the game in a more diverse way tends to lead to ruin or problems when the enemy comes with their own Priests. Honestly, the Priest unit is kinda unbalanced and the game would've been a lot better without them. The music is also worth a special mention as it is incredibly atmospheric and cool, easily one of the best aspects of the game. My guess is that this game would be a lot more fun if you played it online vs friends where you can setup your own custom rules, but that's unfortunately not a possibility for me.
A good game never drops in value and at 10€ this is a steal. Diablo 1 is still, to this day, my favorite Diablo game and a very strong entry in the hack n' slash dungeon crawler genre.
The game was never any good. It wasn't good when it came out, and it certainly isn't good now either. This is just another example of how GOG is trying to push us with whatever games they can get their hands on (maybe they should move away from the weekly model? I'll take quality over quantity. And I'd rather not have the GOG team waste their time making lame crap like this into DRM free. No one with a shred of sanity would care for this). I read antihippie's review and it was spot on. Paying for this game would be a great disservice to you.
