GB Feature: King's Bounty: The Legend Review
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Everything in the huge multi-continent world (with several areas each) is hand placed. No area is random. Travel by dirigible, locomotive, zeppelin, horse, boat. This is what I want when I go exploring through a new world. Sandy beaches that have no roaming monster but form part of the landscape and perhaps have a secret treasure to dig for if you only but take the time to disembark. Islands with bridges and scenery you have no access to for no other reason than to be part of your view in this expansive world. Steam appropriately coming up from the vents and oscillations of the gigantic gears within an underground realm. Mini snow avalanches cascading down laden trees with squirrels dodging in and out. Owls peeking occasionally through high hollow holes in tall trees. Shimmer effects, ambient hover animations for every "clickable" item such as banners, gold chalises, chests, and urns. They did not need to do that. Waving flags (of course), smooth creature walking / roaming animations. I could go on. Rarely do developers put this much effort into the art and graphics. Not even Blizzard has done more in this area for any of their games. Perhaps equal to, but not beyond. They deserve to be praised. Sure, some may complain slightly that they're not using the highest resolution textures, but if that's the case, it's not noticeable or important (to me) and I'd rather have fully rotatable 3D terrain looking this good and running so well at high settings with my now-becoming obsolete GeForce 7900gt and middle aged Athlon system, than any alternative.
Every battle is in a different highly detailed hex-grid venue (like the HOMM series) and character design owes a little to Games Workshop minis as well as past HOMM titles, but extra details show, such as the lanterns atop the Dwarven Miner's heads. Animations all look fluid and are appropriately speedy. There's an option for speeding up battle and I surely thought I would use it (as I did in HOMM), but throughout my first play through I never felt tired of the animations or felt they were too slow.
