King's Bounty: Warriors of the North + DLC Review
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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.
