I wanted to like this game, I love old-school point-and-click adventures, but it's really hard to vibe with it. Most of the time I'm not even sure what my objective is even supposed to be. The very first puzzle involves opening a gate, but I have no idea why nobody else could do? Where is this gate? Am I supposed to go to the gate? Nobody else seems to care about this gate, why do I? Who are these people? Why are they such jerks? I solved the puzzle, it's not actually hard, but then I looked up a walkthrough because I still didn't really understand it. The logic of it just didn't really make sense. The next puzzle isn't much better. There's nothing that really clues you into why you are doing any of this. I started this game with hints turned off, I turned them on in the hope that it would actually make the objectives clearer, it really didn't. I get that the world is supposed to be strange, but I don't think that's the problem. You need to be able to understand the character's motivation, and I don't. The game camera is also frustrating. As you walk around it'll whip around and completely change direction making it really difficult to get to some locations. You'll walk towards something you want to interact with before suddenly changing camera angle so now you can't see the thing you were heading towards. For example, there's a car hood you need to interact with, but you can only click on it from one particular angle that is fiddly to get to. And why you want to isn't obvious either, of course. The writing is also weird, maybe a translation problem? But it feels really strange and unnatural. For example, you get a pamphlet that you have to answer questions about, but the text doesn't make sense. The voice work is not great either, it's passable at best, but often distractingly off. Like everything was recorded in different places with different equipment leading to mismatches. It just doesn't quite fit.
First off, this game should not be compared to HOMM. HOMM is a strategy game with turn-based combat, KB is an adventure/rpg hybrid with turn-based combat. It looks a lot like HOMM, but it really is a completely different type of game. KB has none of the base building and territory claiming aspects of HOMM. The game is colorful with nice high-fantasy graphics. Nothing particularly spectacular, but they fit the setting well. The story and adventure elements are fairly uninspired mix of going from place to place delivering items and killing beasts. Nothing to write home about. It's a little annoying that a game from 2008 has no spoken dialog, but I guess it's better than some terrible translated dialog. The combat is good and has a fair amount of tactical depth with a large selection of units with special abilities and lots of spells to play with. The downside of the game is its steep learning curve. Even the introductory quest is a little touchy for a beginning player, especially since its not really a tutorial and you're never told that your unit losses don't matter in that first quest. You should be able to get through it okay, but you may suffer greater losses than you're comfortable with. After you get out of the introductory part you'll find yourself mostly running away from enemy stacks that are far too strong for you to handle while trying to find some stacks that are weak enough for you to take on without crippling losses so you can build up experience to hire a larger army and finally take on those stacks that were too tough. This mechanic leads to a lot of running back and forth between areas to cherry pick the weakest enemies and then restock your army. This is fine for a while, but as you progress the curve doesn't really get any easier. When your level 17 and enter a new area where everything enemy is strong and you've run out of weak stacks to beat up on, it just gets frustrating. The limited restocking of certain units also makes this more frustrating when you find you've run out of your preferred unit and have to switch.
Quite simply the best story ever told in a computer game. It is dark, and may not be to everybody's taste, and it may take a while to adjust to the unique setting, but once you do it is spectacular. Unlike just about every other cRPG, this isn't about saving the world from some great evil. In this game, the world is brutally indifferent to you and your plight. Your quest is purely to save yourself. It's a refreshing change from the cliches of some many other games. A warning: it's a long game (I didn't finish it my first time through and only recently came back to it), but it is a truly unique piece that is well worth the effort.
From what I understand, this game was brutally panned for being a buggy mess when it was released, but this patched version is actually pretty smooth (I had one crash to desktop in about 40 hours of play, a couple of messed up lines of dialog and one or two quests promise gold as a reward, but still don't give you any) and that game is really a very fun RPG in a similar vain to The Elder Scrolls. First, let me say, it's not as good as Oblivion, but Oblivion is a high bar to reach. It's probably about as good (but a little smaller overall) than Gothic III, but without Gothic III's ridiculous combat system (no danger of your high level character still getting mauled by wolves at the end of the game). The graphics are overall pretty good and varied with some nice effects. Character models and animation are not quite as good but passable. And forsooth, the dialog is mostly awful, but once you stop taking it too seriously, it's okay. Despite being frustrating at first, I actually found the horse ridding part of the game to be immensity satisfying once you've worked out how to control the horse and what it can do. Charging a group of orcs, trampling them under hoof while whacking another with your sword from the saddle is a joy. Then circle around out-of-range and charge them again. Once you've leveled up your horse ridding skills, your horse can become your best weapon for some encounters. Inventory management can also be a bit of a pain. You can sort your loot in your own inventory, but you can't do the same with your horse's. This can make figuring out which pieces of loot you can combine a bit of a chore especially with things like gloves and boots which all look almost the same. Overall, I think this game is a worthwhile distraction at the price and I will certainly keep an eye out for Two Worlds 2.
