A classic - one of my top 10 all time favourites
This one was pretty much under my radar, very little advertising. Hard to find in local stores as well. Hopefully the expansion is marketed better.
Despite the positive reviews I was a little leery. I hadn't been impressed with many of the remakes/sequels to classic games that have been released recently. Heroes of Might and Magic 5 in particular was very disappointing. I was afraid the King's Bounty might be similar.
However, right from the start the I found King's Bounty to be engrossing, better than any of the HoMM games. It is obvious that the game is designed by gamers, for gamers - everything seems to be done right. My system is pretty low spec, below what the game says is the minimum - Athlon 3000, 128Meg 6600 GT. Despite this, the game looks great. The framerate does get a little choppy at times, but overall it looks great. The music was very nice as well.
Some things I particularily enjoyed about the game: It is very well balanced, challenging but not frustrating. If you find a group of monsters you can't currently defeat, come back at a later time. Which brings up another strong point - monster groups don't scale with your abilities. This means that at some point you will be able to beat every monster group, which makes balancing the difficulty of the game much easier. The graphics for the spell effects deserve special mention, I never got tired of them.
From reading the message board for the game, it seems lots of people are rushing through the game in order to get a good score (the final score is another bonus - it tells you all sorts of interesting statistics). I went through slowly, fought everything and tried to complete every quest. I think overall I spent at least 75 hours on the game.
I'm really looking forward to the expansion.