King's Bounty: The Legend

While the games industry in general is desperately trying to appeal to as broad a market as possible, on the far side of the Euro-Russian border there’s a publishing company that habitually puts two fingers up to commercial Western trends and seems to cater exclusively for the taste of its massive hardcore Russian PC fan base. And sometimes the result is a surprising title that we, as PC gamers, can hold above our heads in a proud display of our gaming heritage. Our case in point is King’s Bounty: The Legend, based on the original 1990 title King’s Bounty and that other New World Computing classic, the Heroes Of Might & Magic series. Having snapped up the franchise, 1C slapped the King’s Bounty name on a title being developed by Vladivostok-based developer Katauri, and a year later we’re looking at the resurrection of a dinosaur.

The story of King’s Bounty: The Legend’s conception isn’t romantic, but the game is steeped in PC gaming traditions; the high fantasy and RPG elements that were replete in games of the pre-Doom era. If you thrived on Heroes Of Might & Magic I, II and III despite its flaws, you should revel in King’s Bounty’s turn-based pleasures: you explore a real-time world map littered with treasures, locations and randomly generated monsters. Combat is turn-based and resolved on a hexagonal grid, and with each battle you win your hero gains experience and levels up, increasing in magical power and battle prowess.

Due to its strong RPG thrust, King’s Bounty uses a single hero rather than the multitude you could hire in the HOMM series, and though your primary stats of Attack, Defense and Intelligence have very simple implications, your hero has a skill tree decided by the way you distribute the magical runes you acquire, enabling you to generalise or focus in the areas of might, magic or mind. If you want to cast fireballs yourself, for example, then you’ll have to invest a few runes in a chaos magic so that you can learn spells from scrolls. Alternatively, if you want to focus on increasing abilities and battle stats, then you can rely on the odd scroll for spell-casting.

King’s Bounty’s looks fantastic, and though the graphic engine isn’t cutting-edge, the use of colour and detail is vividly realised. There’s no empire building involved in it (though you can build a family!), so the game sticks to the former part of the explore, expand and conquer strategy of Heroes Of Might & Magic, which should prove a delight for the majority of HOMM fans. However, the text translation isn’t good, and though you can get by wading through lengthy sections of Frenglish, you’ll soon find you don’t really care about the plight of those terrorised villagers any further than the reward and experience you glean from the associated quest. King’s Bounty is also bereft of a map editor, though this oversight may be addressed in the near future with the coming expansion from Katauri. Don’t let either of these negatives scare you off though, King’s Bounty is a highly accessible and very immersive title that any strategy fan will immediately warm to.