I was hoping this game would be good but to my disappointment, there is simply too much I do not like. The graphics and animations are very barebones. Even though it has 3D models, they look like lazily controlled marionettes at best. In combat animations are not even synchronized, with enemies losing health at the start of the attack animation instead of at the contact point, leading to the entire thing feeling kind of cheap. The fights themselves play out pretty terribly. Your non-melee units are rooted in the spot where you start the fight. So against ranged heavy enemy compositions, where you melee fighters have to walk forward to start hitting them, they end up walking out of the range of your healers/support units, rendering them useless. Archers get a massive damage penalty whenever shooting past the range of 3 hexes and many units are outright immune to arrows. Melee characters can only ever attack the nearest enemy unit. There is no walking around enemy units, no in-battle tactics, nothing. The pinnacle of tactics is delaying your unit's turn to the end of the round. All that matters is the initial units placement on a hilariously small battlefield. Melee units then proceed to whack each other to death and the only thing you have control of are ranged units. It has zero depth and just results in constant save/load until you find the best initial unit placement and that's it. Not interested in spending dozens of hours on such a combat "system". The story might be good, but I won't force myself through gameplay I don't like at all because of it. It also has no voice acting and can be quite reading heavy, if you want to catch all the lore and stories. The overworld map navigation also feels mostly like a chore as the movement is pretty clunky and the map is mostly uninteresting, giving me no motivation to explore. I love Disciples, I love Heroes and King's Bounty. But I can't make myself play this game further. Giving this a 4/10. Simply not fun to me.
Going to mainly go into detail about the bonuses of the Premium Edition compared to the normal one. - You get 2 somewhat brief islands to explore. They are much shorter than the locations of the original game, but offer additional fights, items, gold and even a couple of inter-connected quests. - The Clot of Darkness item you get near the start of the game. The store description is wrong, it gives a 5% bonus to XP earned and 5% bonus to leadership. Due to the percentage based leadership bonus, the item maintains relevance throughout the entire game (unlike most other bonus items from other games which are useless after 2 hours of playing). And the XP bonus if course a big boon too. It will provide a distinct advantage over the non-premium edition. - A single new unit and an opportunity to improve one of the existing units. - You also get the opportunity to gather more items to turn in for one of the most complex quests in the game, which asks you to gather paintings of Netana's women. To complete the quest, you need to gather 10 of them, which is only possible when playing as the Demoness (as she gets a portrait of herself) without premium edition. The other characters can only gather 9. The premium adds 4 more paintings to gather, making the quest solvable with the other 2 characters and you can also turn in the left over ones elsewhere for an additional reward. And as for the game itself, I consider it the 2nd best King's Bounty after Legend. If you've played anything between Legend and this, you know exactly what to expect. If you liked them, you will like this one. If you did not, this game won't change that. Really enjoyed playing as the dark creatures. All of them also get a decent amount of unique dialogue options (and even quest solutions), depending on who you play as and some NPC react to you differently. Yes, it's just written dialogue, but still a nice touch. As a King's Bounty enjoyer, this is an easy 9/10.
