King's Bounty [PC]

The King's Bounty name has a lot of weight in Russia and the former Soviet Union, and it even has a number of Western fans who remember the 1990 game that was published by New World Computing. King's Bounty: The Legend is the long-awaited follow-up to the original game, and it's already generating a lot of buzz in Russia, having cleaned up at the awards there of late.

The easiest way to describe The Legend is that it's sort of like a blend of Heroes of Might & Magic with Master of Magic, with an art design that will remind you a bit of WarCraft. This is a sort of adventure strategy game where you guide a hero and army around a map, and they encounter hostile armies which they do battle with. King's Bounty has a few twists on this formula, though.

The first is that the adventure phase, which involves wandering around a map, is done in real-time rather than turns. This makes it more like an old school Final Fantasy game in a way, only you can see enemy armies and encounters on the map. Get too close to one and they trigger; exclamation points appear over their heads and they begin to pursue you. One of the nice things about this being real-time rather than turn-based is that the game moves a lot more quickly; turn-based games require you to plot moves and then hit the turn button to watch them execute.

I engaged in several battles to get a feel for The Legend's combat system. This is a turn-based mode that's not unlike the one found in Heroes of Might & Magic. Your units line up on the battlefield, facing the enemy, and unit stacks take turns to move or attack. A stack consists of a number of the same type of unit, so I had hundreds of pitchfork-armed peasants in one stack, a smaller number of archers in another, and three stacks of different types of spellcasters. They battled skeletons, necromancers, ace throwers, and more.

The battlefield is divided in a hexagonal grid, which means that units can move in one of six directions. One thing I noticed is how the battlefield can be cluttered with terrain; an outcropping of rocks for example might block off a portion of the map. This creates a perfect choke point, as you can station melee units above and below the outcropping and place your ranged units directly behind it. If any enemy stack wants to engage in close combat with your ranged units, they'll have to get around the obstacle and your units. But there's certainly a benefit to getting a melee unit directly adjacent to a ranged one, as the latter has to engage in direct combat with the melee unit next to it; it cannot attack distant units while it's vulnerable to close attack.

There are special attacks that you can call upon, such as spirits. These are basically elemental spirits that can carve a swathe on the battlefield, such as the spirits of rage that manifest some demons that can attack multiple units simultaneously. These are useful to "soften up" large formations since they're basically an area-of-effect spell. Then there's traditional magic spells, such as heal or stone skin, or haste.

Should you be victorious after a battle you'll amass experience that may be enough to level up your hero. Then you can usually select an upgrade, such as improving the hero's leadership ability or giving him a boost in a certain statistic. Necromancy will also resurrect a portion of your losses, but it's not a particularly huge number.

It's difficult to really get a feel for such a large game in just a handful of minutes, but this looks like a treat for those who love the Heroes of Might & Magic school of gameplay. The fantasy setting is bright and colorful, and there's a huge variety of units and races to play with. King's Bounty: The Legend should ship this year.

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