The combat is thoughtful, an expansion of a solid battle system that makes strong use of the newly 3D backdrops, although it does feel curiously separate from the exploration phase of the game. I'm hoping the finished game will make some effort to educate in this regard, as I never felt like I was doing much more than just muddling through the combat.Īs I put down King's Bounty 2-my exploration curtailed on several fronts by battles I wasn't powerful, or clever, enough to beat-I was left scratching my head at what I made of its peculiar genre collision. But even aside from that consideration, just five units is a hard limit, and it can be difficult to know which ones to bring to each particular rumble.
There are four general classes of unit: Order, Anarchy, Power and Finesse, and their morale will drop if you thoughtlessly mix them all together. You might now be wondering how humans, elemental constructs, thieves and skeletons get on with each other, and the answer, unsurprisingly, is: they don't. Probably the most important decision in a battle will happen just before you start it: which units are you going to take into combat with you? You can only bring five, and they span a broad range of strengths and abilities, from the snarling attack dogs that can perform nifty hit-and-run attacks, to the iron golems that hit hard but move incredibly, painfully slowly. Sidequests generally contained just one battle (along with a very simple environmental puzzle), although these were tricky encounters that required some thoughtful tinkering to win. I found surprisingly few battles during my time with King's Bounty 2, either coming upon them out in the wilderness, or triggering combat during quests. I scoured the world pretty thoroughly for encounters that would train me up for the harder battles, but even after fighting supposedly weaker groups of enemies, I would often come away bearing significant losses.
Balance fixes have been promised for the finished game, and I hope they apply to the combat, as the difficulty ramped up sharply after I entered the Crown Lands. If every member of a unit perishes-say, if all four of your golems turn to mulch-then you'll lose them forever and have to swap in units from your reserve, or else track down a recruiter to buy replacements. The game is good at informing you about the potential outcomes of your actions, so I would often chew on turns for ages, trying to minimise my losses the best I could. You position your units, and then take turns with the enemy to whittle down everyone's health bars, while your hero chips in occasionally with a powerful spell. While previous Bounty battles took place on tiny hex-based grids, here those grids have been expanded, and embellished with different levels of elevation, and various line-of-sight blocking obstacles. They're there, in your back pocket, as you clomp around the world, popping out every so often to dutifully fight on your behalf. In King's Bounty, you hire nameless soldiers to do your dirty work, including human swordsmen and archers, beasts such as wolves and bears, and even undead skeletons and ghouls. When you do choose to engage in combat, you're told exactly which enemies to expect, and how strong they are compared to your current party. If I didn't find much humour in the writing, then it's here in the game mechanics, as 1C retains the series' essence in its brave new 3D world. But the absolute best part of the glowing barriers is that the bandits or skeletons, bears or elemental creatures will scamper out and waggle their weapons as you approach the border, like playground bullies in a Beano comic strip. There's no time pressure to engage with baddies, nor any risk of a surprise attack as you serenely wander through this fantasy world. Remember those enemies I mentioned, the ones waiting politely behind their glowing barriers? It's a feature common to games with strategic maps, and I admire developer 1C Entertainment for using it in a more grounded setting, even at the risk of undermining the sacred immersion. However, if you approach it from another angle-as an ambitious reworking of the core King's Bounty concept-there's more to be hopeful about. From what I've seen of the game, I think it will suffer when compared to modern open world RPGs, for which a 'living, breathing world' is of paramount importance.
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