King's Bounty II Review
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Introduction
The first King's Bounty game was released in 1990 by New World Computing. I only played it very briefly (and kept dying quickly), but it's considered to be the precursor to the Heroes of Might & Magic franchise. It featured turn-based battles between your army and numerous enemies, but instead of capturing towns and defeating opposing heroes, you were tasked with locating the fabled Sceptre of Order within a time limit to keep King Maximus alive.
When most people talk about King's Bounty, though, they're probably thinking of King's Bounty: The Legend and its three (depending on how you want to count them) follow-ups, which were released between 2008 and 2014. These games kept the same formula as the original, with turn-based battles galore, but they added in extra RPG elements, including skills and quests.
Now we have King's Bounty II from the 1C Company (as both developer and publisher), but I'm not sure which game it's supposed to be the sequel to. King's Bounty: The Legend and its follow-ups where also released by 1C, but the new game includes a lot of references to King Maximus from the original game, and it doesn't mention the other games at all (at least so far as I noticed). But King's Bounty II stays in the same lane as its predecessors, and it continues the franchise's advancement into RPG-land, with a heavier reliance on conversations and quests, and a reduction in battles. Is this change for the better? Keep reading to find out.
Characters and Ideals
As King's Bounty II opens up, you learn that numerous bad things have been happening in your corner of the world: the undead are rising, a blight is spreading, and a city was destroyed under mysterious circumstances. Plus, the king was poisoned, leaving his son in charge. So the prince tabs you, the accused royal poisoner, as the solution, and you're released from prison so you can set everything straight. Does this make sense? Not even remotely, but then writing isn't the game's strong point. (Of course, the game ends with an annoying "to be continued" notice after a major fight, so we don't know the entire story yet. It's possible the prince is really a bad guy with his own agenda. He's certainly been getting a bad guy edit.)
When you create your character, you're given three choices: Katharine the mage, Elisa the paladin, or Aivar the warrior. You can't change your character's name, gender or appearance; there aren't any stats to roll or allocate; and there isn't even a difficulty setting. You just choose your character, and that's it. Mages are good at spellcasting, warriors are good at physical combat, and paladins reside somewhere in between. If you've played any of the earlier King's Bounty games, then the classes should sound familiar.
King's Bounty II uses "ideals" in a lot of ways. There are four ideals -- anarchy, order, finesse, and power -- where anarchy opposes order, and finesse opposes power. Many of the quests give you two ways to complete an objective, where the two ways coincide with two of the opposing ideals. For example, you might steal something (anarchy) or buy it (order), or you might solve a puzzle (finesse) or blindly attack anything that moves (power). Each time you complete an objective associated with an ideal, you gain points for that ideal.
There are four talent trees in the game, one for each ideal. Each tree has ten talents, and all of the talents are passive. As you gain points for an ideal through quests, you unlock talents in that ideal's talent tree, which you can then purchase using the talent points you gain when leveling up. There are more ideal points available than you need to unlock everything in an ideal's talent tree, but not by much, so you need to focus on one or two ideals to unlock the best talents. In general, anarchy talents improve income and trickiness, order talents improve healing and morale, finesse talents improve spellcasting, and power talents improve damage and defense. The talents in all four trees are useful for all characters, so you have to be careful about how you solve quests and spend your talent points, which is nice. Better yet, if you don't like how you've built your character, you're allowed to reset your talent points (but not your ideal points) and re-allocate them.
You can also control up to five stacks of units in your character's army. Units belong to one of the four ideals, and they have a leadership cost, which controls how many of them you can have in a stack. Paladins have the highest leadership rating and thus the most units, while mages have the lowest leadership rating and the least units. Strangely, there is also a cap for each unit, and once you reach that cap, you're not allowed to have more of that unit in a stack, even if they'd fit under your leadership rating. This makes low level troops even worse than you'd expect.
Each ideal has roughly a dozen units, giving King's Bounty II only about half as many units as King's Bounty: The Legend. Worse, many of the King's Bounty II units are simple upgrades of each other, so it feels like there are even fewer units than there are. For example, the order ideal features mostly standard human troops, and they include level 1 healers and level 3 disciples, which are about the same except for disciples being more powerful.
You're also somewhat restricted to using units from one or two ideals. The more you mix units from different ideals, the more of a morale penalty the units take (especially if you mix units from opposing ideals), and the lower a unit's morale is, the more likely it is to skip its turn during battles. Conversely, the higher a unit's morale is, the more likely it is to gain an extra turn during battles, and if you only use units from a single ideal, then you start out with +1 morale.
As you use units in battles, they gain experience and can rise in rank from 1 to 3. As units increase their rank, they become more powerful, sometimes gaining extra skills. For example, the order ideal's disciple units gain a Ray of Light spell as they advance, which adds a damaging spell to their repertoire. You can also keep units in reserve. This reserve space is unlimited (and available right away), and it means you can stockpile extra copies of the units you like, and not have to run back to recruiters (who sell units) as often.
Finally, characters can wear equipment. There are ten item slots available, including slots for body armor, boots, and gloves -- plus some sort of "horse" slot that isn't used for anything. Items give bonuses to your character (for spellcasting) and to your army (for battles), and they come in a variety of qualities, including unique items and set items. Unlike King's Bounty: The Legend, all of the major items in King's Bounty II appear at fixed locations (some as quest rewards, some from shops), so you're guaranteed to get complete sets if you want them. A few of the sets are really useful (like a necromancy set that gives all sorts of bonuses to undead units), but most don't provide enough of a benefit to bother with, and a few are just plain strange (like two sets that do nothing more than improve your shopping prices). There's just barely enough variety to the equipment for it to be interesting in the game.
Gameplay: Questing
Apparently, 1C wanted King's Bounty II to feel more like an RPG than a strategy game, and so they made a couple of important changes to shift the focus. The most obvious is that they switched from using an isometric view to a third-person over-the-shoulder view. This, of course, makes the game more "modern" and "immersive" -- at least that's what their marketing department probably told them -- but in reality it just makes King's Bounty II look like a lightweight Skyrim (or Witcher or take your pick of third-person RPG).
The graphics engine just feels cheap, and issues abound, including lots of obvious seams in the terrain, and maybe ten basic faces that are used for all of the characters you meet, so that everybody looks like distant cousins of each other. When I played King's Bounty: The Legend and its follow-ups, I never thought, "Wow, that looks bad," but I thought that a lot during King's Bounty II. The switch in perspective doesn't help the game at all.
The other major change for King's Bounty II is that 1C greatly decreased the number of battles. Now most of the battles are tied to quests, and the rest act as roadblocks, so you don't wander into a region until you're powerful enough to survive there. There's actually an achievement for King's Bounty II that you earn for defeating 70 enemy armies. I got it right near the end of my first game (where I was playing Aivar the warrior and following the power ideal, which meant I was fighting extra battles). I'm pretty sure King's Bounty: The Legend had about 70 battles in the first region of the game.
With fewer battles, that means you spend more time running around and talking to people. Some people are shopkeepers (who sell equipment and spell scrolls), some are recruiters (who sell army units), and some give you quests. Luckily, the quests work pretty well. There is a nice variety to the objectives and storylines, the side quests support the main quests and add to the worldbuilding, and because of the opposing ideal objectives, there's even some replay value.
But on the downside, the writing and voice acting are sub-par. The former features a serious but dull tone, and lacks the charm (and kookiness) of the earlier King's Bounty games. The latter involves a lot of people reading their lines so you know what they're saying, but with no emotion behind their words. Plus, with all of the characters looking alike, they and their stories tend to blend together, creating more of a mess than a highlight for the game. As a result, everything outside of combat is at best a mixed bag.
Gameplay: Combat
Enemy armies are indicated by a wide yellow circle around them. If you walk into the circle, then you're shown the units in the opposing army, and you're given the option of retreating or attacking. There isn't any penalty for retreating, and enemies never chase you around, so you always get to pick when to fight.
When a battle starts up, each stack of units involved gets one turn per round, with the order being determined by the units' initiative stat. Your character doesn't participate directly, but you can cast one or two (if you have the top finesse talent) spells per round. Spells mainly buff allies, debuff enemies, or deal damage. All characters can cast spells, but only mages are really good at it.
When a unit takes its turn, it's allowed to move and attack. If a unit makes a melee attack, then their target is allowed to counterattack once per round, which means it's best to gang up on enemies rather than spread your hits around. Ranged attacks don't have to worry about counterattacks. This is the same ruleset as employed by King's Bounty: The Legend and its follow-ups, where as a result ranged attackers were the dominant force.
To mitigate this dominance, 1C added 3D terrain to their battle maps. Now ranged units need to have line-of-sight to attack enemies, and things like trees and hills and haystacks can get in the way. Unfortunately, sometimes flat ground and low bushes get in the way as well, so it's still a work in progress. But I think the idea is right, to make melee units more useful.
Most of the units in the game fall into one of three categories: melee unit, ranged unit, or spellcaster. There are a couple of dragon units that become available at the end, but otherwise the units are pretty cut-and-dried. Nothing is as creative as, say, King's Bounty: The Legend's goblin shamans with their totems, or giants with their earthquake ability. It's pretty much just melee attack, ranged attack, or spell (which is frequently just a disguised ranged attack) over and over again in different shapes and flavors. Still, because the Resurrection spell takes a while to find, it's difficult to keep all of your units alive, and so there's always strategy in the battles.
Conveniently, when units "die" in a battle, you can "heal" them afterwards, provided you didn't lose the entire stack. This costs some gold, but it's cheaper (and way faster) than constantly returning to recruiters to refill your ranks. Some units can "purge" defeated units, preventing them from being healed later, so these units become Public Enemy #1 during battles. The healing mechanic also means you have to be careful with your stacks, both in preventing them from being completely destroyed, and in choosing your units carefully so you don't have stacks with only one or two units in them (where one unlucky critical hit might take them out).
The battle difficulty is variable. King's Bounty II doesn't have a difficulty setting, but your set-up can make the game easier -- or not. For my first game, I played as a warrior using order units, and I had an easy time. I'm pretty sure warriors are the most powerful class, and the order ideal has the best units (among other things, they're the only ideal with healers). The main challenge for this playthrough was winning battles efficiently rather than winning them at all. But then I started a game as a mage using anarchy units, and I had a much tougher time. I haven't finished this game yet -- it's taking a lot longer to navigate my way through battles this way -- but so far the spell advantage of mages isn't making up for the physical advantage of warriors, especially since warriors can do useful things with spells even with their restrictions. 1C will probably do some class and troop balancing at some point, but if not then you can always use the differences to create your own difficulty settings.
There are also some puzzles for you to complete, but they're not really challenging. Some of the puzzles can be completed in any haphazard way -- for example, by pushing four buttons in any order to open a secret door -- and for most of the others, you're given a clue that shows you exactly how to solve them, so no great ingenuity is required. Still, easy puzzles are better than no puzzles, I guess.
Conclusion
1C has released some nice patches for King's Bounty II since its release, and they've fixed some of the more obvious problems with the game, like the lack of a quick save button, and the poorly-implemented tooltips. I didn't have any major problems with the game during the 60+ hours I spent playing it (including no crashes at all), but a couple of skills and talents don't seem to work as described, so either they're described poorly or they're broken, take your pick.
But 1C didn't do itself any favors by having the game end with "to be continued." Nobody likes that, regardless of the medium (or maybe you're still waiting with bated breath for the Alita: Battle Angel sequel). With some developers (like, say, Larian or ZA/UM), I'd be hopeful that the game just shipped slightly incomplete, and that eventually a free content DLC would flesh everything out, but in this case I suspect that 1C is hoping that people will pay to see the ending, and purchase some extra DLC. If so, then bleh on them.
Still, I enjoy turn-based strategy games, and even with the negatives I've pointed out in this review, King's Bounty II worked well enough for me. It's not as good as King's Bounty: The Legend, with less than half the options and content, but it gets enough things right to be worth playing. So I'm giving the game a borderline recommendation, but you're probably better off waiting for some more patches and a decent sale before buying it.
