King's Bounty: Warriors of the North + DLC Review
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Introduction
King's Bounty: Warriors of the North is the latest installment in the King's Bounty franchise. The original King's Bounty was released way back in 1990 by New World Computing. Years later, the publisher 1C Company bought the rights to the franchise, and they allowed Katauri Interactive to create new King's Bounty games, which resulted in King's Bounty: The Legend (released in 2008), King's Bounty: Armored Princess (2010), and King's Bounty: Crossworlds (also 2010).
As for Warriors of the North, it was released by Katauri in October of 2012, but then 1C Company apparently had a change of heart. They handed off the Ice and Fire DLC pack to Revultive Software, and it came out a little over a year later, in January of 2014. Meanwhile, a third developer, 1C-Softclub, is currently working on King's Bounty: Dark Side, which is scheduled to be released in June. This review is for Warriors of the North and Ice and Fire together, since they intertwine to create a new campaign, much like Armored Princess and Crossworlds did previously.
The King's Bounty games have always provided long campaigns with a lot of content, but they've also been sloppy and similar. Is Warriors of the North any different? Is it worth your money? Does it take the franchise in any new directions? Keep reading to find out.
Warriors of the North
King's Bounty: Warriors of the North is much like King's Bounty: Armored Princess. It's a sequel to King's Bounty: The Legend, but it uses the same engine and it doesn't change much. It's what some people call an "expandalone," a stand-alone expansion pack. The main difference between the games is that instead of having spirits of rage (The Legend) or pet dragons (Armored Princess), you meet five Valkyries, and they control most of your rage talents. The Valkyries also conveniently fill the same role as your wife (The Legend) or companion (Armored Princess), and they sit in the same place in the interface.
If you haven't played any of the King's Bounty games, let me give you a brief overview. You create a hero in one of three classes (warrior, spellcaster, or hybrid) and you recruit troops into your army. You have five slots for your troops, and you can recruit some number of creatures for each troop depending on your leadership statistic. So early in the game you might have several archers in one troop and a single giant in another, because giants require more leadership than archers.
Your hero has equipment, stats, and a spellbook, and he gains experience and levels, but he doesn't participate directly in battles, which occur when your army encounters an enemy army. Battles take place on hexagonal grids and proceed in rounds. During each round, your troops and the enemy troops take turns moving and attacking, with the order of battle depending on the initiative of the troops involved.
Your goal in each battle is to destroy the enemy army while taking as few losses as possible in yours. To help you out in this regard, during each round your hero can cast a spell and use a rage talent, provided he has the mana and rage necessary for the attacks. Most rage talents simply cause damage in Warriors of the North, but spells can do all sorts of things, from damaging enemies to buffing your troops to turning enemies into harmless sheep.
Along with regular battles against enemy armies, you also sometimes encounter enemy heroes (who can cast spells just like your hero) and special bosses (where you're not allowed to use rage talents). Most of the regular battles are straightforward to win, but the hero and boss fights can be tricky and provide most of the challenge in the game.
In the campaign that comes with Warriors of the North, you control a Viking named Olaf, who is the youngest son of the Viking king. As the game opens up, undead creatures start attacking the islands belonging to the Vikings, and your brother starts acting strangely, which results in you being thrust into combat duty. Your battles against the undead and your investigation into their presence take you all over the world, from the Viking islands to the more familiar territories of the humans, elves, and dwarves, where you have to fight hundreds of battles as well as complete quests and talk to NPCs. As far as structure goes, Warriors of the North (and the other King's Bounty titles) are organized just like an RPG, where NPCs and enemy armies wait for you to show up. There aren't any opposing players in the game, so you can take your time and explore each location as slowly and carefully as you want.
Along with meeting Valkyries during the campaign, a couple of the other changes in Warriors of the North include a re-arrangement of the spell system so there is now Rune magic, and special runes troops can use during combat to increase their attack or defense, or give them a chance at an extra action during the current round. There is also a new Viking faction, which include battle maidens (fast melee units that can resurrect fallen allies), soothsayers (who can cause snowstorms), and jarls (slow moving tanks). Viking troops get more combat runes than other troops, which gives them a small advantage in battle.
Warriors of the North works well enough, but it has two significant issues. The first is that it goes against one of the strengths of the franchise -- the sheer variety of troops that you can recruit and fight against. During the first stage of the campaign (about 30 hours), you're all but forced to use Viking troops, and about 75% of your battles come against the undead. Fighting essentially the same battle over and over again isn't a lot of fun.
The other issue also has to do with repetition. The Viking faction is new in Warriors of the North, but all of the other troops are old, and you re-visit a bunch of old locations, like Greenwort, Demonis and the Freedom Islands. That means playing Warriors of the North feels a whole lot like playing The Legend or Armored Princess. I really liked The Legend when I played it a few years ago, but now it feels like I'm playing the exact same game for the third time, and it's getting old.
Ice and Fire
The Ice and Fire DLC isn't a standalone product. It doesn't provide content for your hero from Warriors of the North to visit after completing that campaign. Instead, the DLC adds new troops, quests and locations to the Warriors of the North campaign, and it changes how the campaign works. This might be good or bad, depending on your perspective. The good news is that the DLC gives you about 30 hours of new content, plus a reason to repeat playing the 100+ hour Warriors of the North campaign, all for a fairly minor price. The bad news is that you have to repeat a large portion of the 100+ hour Warriors of the North campaign, which you might not have enjoyed so much the first time, in order to see the new stuff. I was lucky. I hadn't played Warriors of the North yet when Ice and Fire came out, and so I played them both for the first time together.
Ice and Fire includes a lot of changes. The most interesting of these is that it allows troops to gain experience and rise up to level 10. Each time a troop attacks or uses a skill, it gains some experience, and when it accumulates enough for a new level, it receives a bonus to attack and defense and sometimes something else. Different troops gain different bonuses when leveling up (or maybe it's just random). Looking at my jarl troop, which I used for the entire campaign, it ended up with +11 attack, +9 defense, +1 initiative, +8% critical hit chance, +20% damage, +10% health, and +3 combat runes. It takes a while to raise a troop to the maximum level, but obviously it's worthwhile, and the Warriors of the North campaign is nothing if not long enough to grind out experience for troops.
The second major change is the addition of two new factions: snow elves and undead lizardmen. The snow elves include troops like ice thorns, frost unicorns, and snowflake fairies, but these are basically just recolored versions of existing troops who now do frost damage. Meanwhile, the undead lizardmen are basically the same as the regular lizardmen, except that half of them are now opaque. In other words, the new factions in Ice and Fire aren't as interesting as the Viking faction from Warriors of the North, and perhaps as a consequence you don't see them as much in the campaign (they're only found in one or two maps each).
The third change in the DLC pack is the addition of some new maps and quests, centered around problems in the Ice Gardens. When you reach the Ice Gardens (roughly halfway into the Warriors of the North campaign), you learn that the snow elves and ice elementals living there are having problems with the lizardmen and fire elementals who suddenly showed up in the caves beneath them. You then have to find out what's going on, and eventually move the lizardmen to the Marshan Swamp, a location that had been (oddly) unavailable in the Warriors of the North campaign.
If some of these changes sound familiar, it's because about half of them were lifted directly from the Red Sands mod for King's Bounty: Crossworlds. That makes the DLC even iffier than it would have been otherwise. If you've already played Warriors of the North and Red Sands, then there's almost nothing new to make the DLC worthwhile, unless you happen to have an exceptional amount of free time that you don't know what to do with.
One other issue with the DLC -- I think -- is that it makes the Warriors of the North campaign disturbingly easy. I didn't play Warriors of the North without Ice and Fire, so maybe it was just easy anyway, but with the DLC and troops at level 10, almost every fight was a pushover. I defeated bosses in the first round, I defeated "invincible" heroes without taking a loss, and I ended up playing about half of the campaign with only three troops instead of five just so there'd be some challenge. Now, I only played on the "normal" difficulty setting rather than "impossible," but I used that same difficulty when playing The Legend and Armored Princess, and they were still challenging. Warriors of the North became sort of a boring slog by the time I reached the end.
Sloppiness and Bugs
All of the King's Bounty games have had issues -- I remember that the text in The Legend didn't get fixed until a fan finally got fed up and made a mod to replace it -- but Warriors of the North is worse. I don't think you can read two consecutive sentences in the game without encountering an error in spelling, grammar, punctuation, or translation.
As an example, consider the spirit talent Favorite of the Gods. The description in the game reads: "Units. Probability of returning 10% damage 10% incurred by an enemy warrior." Well, that's clear, right? It turns out that the talent reflects 10% of the damage incurred 10% of the time -- or on average 1% of the damage incurred. So not only is the talent poorly described, it's also completely worthless. If you're taking so much damage that returning 1% of it is helping you out, then you're doing something wrong.
Warriors of the North also has an unfortunate number of bugs, even in the original campaign that has been out for over a year now. There are broken quests, there are missing animations, troops can have negative health and not die, you can lose all of your spells just before the final battle, there is an annoying scripting error with lizardmen where an error notification keeps popping up over and over again, and more. Kitauri was bad at fixing bugs, but Revultive apparently doesn't know what the letters Q and A are for. I'd probably be a lot more forgiving of Warriors of the North if I thought anybody involved in its production actually cared about it.
Conclusion
If you've read all of the text in my review, then you probably already know what my conclusion is going to be. Warriors of the North is easily the worst of the King's Bounty titles, and Ice and Fire doesn't do anything to help it -- and in fact might actually hurt it. I'm not optimistic at all about the upcoming Dark Side sequel, as it looks like it's going to be the same game for yet the fourth time and might as well be called King's Bounty: The Money Grab. If you're feeling nostalgic about King's Bounty, then I'd recommend that you go back and play The Legend. There's still fun to be found there. Leave the Warriors of the North alone.
