King's Bounty: Armored Princess Impressions, Part Two
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These are, essentially, a collection of uber-spells, only they're not linked to how much mana you've got left, which spells you've learned or have one-shot scrolls for, whether you've found enough runes to level up your Order, Chaos or Distortion magic. You get the picture. Magic is a pretty complicated business from afar, though I promise it all makes perfect sense a few hours in. The Chest of Rage only made things more complicated splitting these uber-powers into four separate skill trees, each of which levels up individually depending on how much you used them. All a bit much, really though the effects of the four godlike creatures performing these acts of destruction for you were mightily impressive. In AP, you just get a cute dragon all the Rage (a recharging resource used solely for these special attacks) mechanics distilled into one set of abilities, as carried out by said dragon. It's a lot more straightforward, but it doesn't decrease the depth of the combat in any way it just takes out some of unnecessary between-fights fuss by consolidating the Rage resource/abilities into one place.
Maybe it's a bit too cute, too. It's a baby dragon, all giant feet and eyes, it falls asleep after its cast one of its powers, it picks apples from a nearby tree that seems to travel everywhere with it while it watches you fight, and it keeps cuddling up to a mysterious snail. I would love it if said snail turned out to be the game's ultimate big bad. It's up to something, I'm sure of it. Its inital powers involve a bicycle kick to the face of an unsuspecting enemy and digging up treasure chests like a puppydog retrieving an old bone. It's cute. Cute-cutey-wutey-cute. I've called it Lord Ragington IV in the hope of making it seem a bit less cute, but somehow that's only made things worse. Well, not worse. Just. cute.
