A nice, innovative TBS.
And now there is King's Bounty (KB). KB is a game with dragons, undead, demons,… you know the drill; but the way you play it is quite different from the classic TBS game: you run around in real-time, but the fighting is turn-based. While running around you pick up quests and have strange conversations; and while in combat you cast spells, fight, and use the rather cool Box of Rage.
But I'm running ahead, let's start with the beginning: the installation.
I didn't really like the installation method of this game; you have to carefully read the instructions on the screen to get it installed where you want it, and it crashed a few times because I was watching something in media player. But besides those problems, it did what it had to do: install the game.
When you launch the game you have the classic intro-movies which you can luckily skip, and after the movies you see a nice image of a human knight and some other creatures. You have options, load, new game, … tabs. As a new player, you click the new game tab. Then you choose your class and a name and the game begins. You will probably notice that you can only pick human heroes, but don't worry, you won't have to save the world with only human troops in your army. After you picked your hero you spawn in some dungeon and you get your first quest.
In this game you have an actual quest book, in which you can track all of your quests. Yes, you can actually do more than one quest at the same time. After you finished the tutorial, in which you learn to fight; use magic; dig up treasures, you can go and speak to your king. After you spoke to your king, you are free to do what you want. You can go and help the people in the neighboring village (sadly you can't burn them), you can kill the creatures in the wild and take the treasure they are guarding,…
The game world is immensely detailed, from squirrels in the trees to cobwebs in the tombs; you will get surprised everywhere you look. One problem of all these details is the fact you easily miss objects you can "use" in the game world. Often these objects (i.e. urns, tombs, stashes,…) contain gold and precious items; which are both very useful for the beginning adventurer.
Also the conversations you will have are worth a mention: often you will have the choice to answer rude or polite, and depending on your answer the quest-reward can be different, or even the whole quest can be different. You will also notice the conversations are quite funny, with many references to movies and different games.
On your journey you will eventually inspect your hero, and you will notice the hero-screen is quite full: You have four main attributes: Leadership, Strength, Defense and Intellect. Leadership determines the amount of troops you can take with you. Every unit occupies a certain amount of leadership (i.e. an archmage is 200 leadership; a zombie is a mere 35) and you can only have that much of one unit type as your leadership allows you (i.e. an hero with a leadership of 500 could take two archamges and 14 zombies). Strength increases the damage your troops do, Defense decreases the damage they receive and Intellect increases your mana and the damage you deal with spells.
You can also see how much gold, rage and mana you have. Gold is used to buy troops and artifacts, rage is used (later on) to summon the spirits of rage and mana is used to cast spells. There is also a strange icon in the bottom left corner of the screen, and it seems like it is just some spare place, but later on the Box of Rage will come here. In the middle of the screen you see the portrait of the hero, and also its inventory and his army. Once you get married you will also see your wife's inventory and her portrait. You wife doesn't actually fight but she can provide bonuses for you and your army and she can give you a child, which also provide bonuses.
There is quite a variety of items you can keep in your inventory, of which the most common are those items you can equip. You can also carry quest-items (from paintings to rings to a cow) and special "use" items. Most often these "use" items will be the eggs or seed of some sort of creature, and once you use those items the creatures will join your army. There is only one problem: if your army is full and you use those items, the creatures will be lost… The most special objects in your inventory are living items. Living items are often very potent magic weapons, and they have some sort of "soul". Depending on their race/function they will lose/gain morale while fighting different enemies (i.e. a dwarven hammer will "enjoy" fighting elves while he will "hate" it to fight dwarves).
Once an item's morale reaches zero, it will no longer obey you and you will lose its bonuses. You can either make the item happy by fighting different troops or by suppressing it. If you choose to suppress it you will fight the guardians of the item. This fight will be same like any other fight, but now the enemy will be supported by evil gremlins on floating towers. Logically the stronger the item, the stronger the enemy.
In the hero's inventory is also a spell book. If you click on the book you will see all the different spells you have learned and also what scrolls you posses. You can cast a spell directly from those scrolls, thus losing the scroll but paying no mana, or you can learn the spell on the scroll. To learn a spell you must have the required skill level in a certain school of magic, and you must also have enough crystals. Crystals can be found all around the game world and they are used to learn and upgrade spells. You can see the amount of crystals you posses on the side of you spell book.
The last part of the hero-screen is his skill tree. On the top of the tree is a list of runes: Might, Will and Magic. You can use these runes to upgrade different skills on the tree, providing you with varying bonuses.
Once you accumulated enough experience your hero will gain a level. Once you leveled, a screen will pop up, giving you the choice between two bonuses (always chose the leadership bonus;) ) and providing you with numerous runes which you can spend on skills.
But enough about the character, let's talk about the part of the game you will spend most time on: the combat. To get in combat, you have to run into an enemy, or if he doesn't like you, the enemy will run into you. Once you entered combat, the game becomes turn based. The board is made up hexagonal tiles, and all of you troops are deployed to one side, while (most often) the enemy's troops are deployed to the other. From then on the unit with the highest initiative gets the first go, and so on. Once one of your unit's can have a go, you can do three things: Cast a spell, use the box of rage or use the unit. Once you use the unit, you can no longer cast spells/ use the box until one of your units can fight again.
In the first part of the game, you will only get to play with human soldiers, but further on you can ask demons, dwarves, undead, elves,… to join your ranks, and every unit comes with its own pro's and contra's (i.e. a bear has huge damage, an increased chance to "critical strike" but it doesn't have that much live). Many of the units will also have their own special skills; some are one-use only, other skills have a recharge time.
As a last part I'd like to talk about the music. The sound effects are not bad, but neither special, but the soundtrack in combat as well as in the game world exists of one song, with a particularly distinct part. After hearing this part 500 times during the same combat, you will want to throw your speakers out of the window. Have mercy with your speakers and just turn of the music in the options menu. Thank you…
So, I think I have mentioned about everything in the game, here is short round-up of the goods and the bads:
Good: A huge, detailed world; you WILL get addicted, a nice real-time rpg part; funny conversations; intense combat; many different quests; many different units; you WILL get addicted; many different skills; some nice and original spells; the Box of Rage; a bigger skill tree than in most RTS-games; a nice items-system; you WILL get addicted, …
Bad: you WILL get addicted; a strange installation; sometimes distracting details; the most annoying soundtrack of the past century; once you used an item that gives you creatures, you will lose them if you have no place in your army
Overall this is a really nice game, with some nice innovations in the TBS-world. They should combine this game with disciples and Homam; it would probably give THE TBS-game…
As for now, do yourself a favor and go and buy this game for Christmas/new year.