King's Bounty: Simplifying the Simple
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In KB:TL, you fight enemy mobs scattered around the maps and do quests for NPCs, but there are no real decisions to make. You're either powerful enough to fight an enemy army or you're not, in which case you avoid the encounter until you've leveled your hero and control a more powerful force. So all the interesting stuff takes place in the tactical battles, but the tactical battles aren't different enough from one another to remain interesting over the long haul. After a while, I start to feel like I'm playing a more involved JRPG but without the flashy cinematics and operatic story.
What's missing in KB:TL is a sense of danger. You can lose a strategy game through poor decisions or poor execution, but in KB:TL choices are largely consequence-free. Gold is the only resource, and it is plentiful enough that money is a non-issue. This makes losses in combat irrelevant, because all you have to do is go to the nearest friendly recruiting post and draft another group of troops into your army. With passive enemies and an endless number of reinforcements standing by, the player can just keep coming so long as his patience holds out.
