King's Bounty: The Legend

Let's take a look at a typical job description for a fantasy hero: »You are a young, dynamic managing director with a focus on hero account management, have you completed your training with at least level 1 and are looking for your first challenges? Can you kill dragons, hire and lead employees, father children, build castles? Do you master the magic business, love to travel, preferably in short stages, and like to collect valuable resources? Then come join us! We offer a service horse of the upper middle class, regular income and commissions above the tariff! «

So this is the typical job offer. Could come from Heroes of Might & Magic - except for making children, of course. And now forget about it. Eliminate travel in stages, killing dragons, building castles, regular income, collecting raw materials. Sounds boring, isn't it for you? Stupid - you just turned down a great job in King's Bounty!

Fake left, pass right

Basically, King's Bounty plays like its brother Heroes of Might & Magic , like a mix of strategy, tactics and role play. But the first difference is immediately noticeable: Even in the nicely made tutorial in the hero school, where we do some simple tasks and fights, our warrior gallops through the training dungeons in real time instead of round by round. If he gets too close to an enemy group, red exclamation marks appear over the enemy and they come towards us. With the space bar we can pause the game and study the enemy cluster: We see the troops contained, their number and a written assessment of the chances from "much weaker" to "fatal". First the fight itself takes place in the good old round sequence - but more on that later.

The real-time model allows us tactical tricks, for example to attract enemies and then bypass them. We use such tricks more often; For example, we evade patrols in an underground museum in order to face an enemy hero at the end of the dungeon without any previous losses.

Flora, fauna, enemies

The fantasy world Endoria is divided into several continents, which in turn consist of individual regions. And they are varied: Already in the starting area there are forests, a swamp with an eerily beautiful cemetery, we travel to palm islands and climb serpentines. The respective enemy types fit into the ambience: in the swamp we fight snakes, spiders and carnivorous plants, at sea we fight pirates and amphibians. This may be realistic, but it also has the disadvantage that we often encounter the same types of troops in one area. Before that gets boring, we are usually somewhere else again, as many quests take us very far.

Occasionally enemy armies are led by heroes who, like us, intervene in combat with spells but are not actively on the battlefield. These battles are more difficult, but they bring better rewards. Since the strength of the opponent is always displayed, the learning curve and level of difficulty increase gently: We start with weak armies - if a troop is too powerful, we will come back later with a higher level and troop contingent. This is also extremely motivating: finally become strong enough to knock down the hero whose head our quest giver is demanding! Too bad: A multiplayer part is completely missing.

We don't need another hero

There are only three hero classes to choose from: Warrior, Mage and Paladin, a kind of warrior-mage. The choice of class determines how many troops our hero can carry with him at the start, which particularly powerful spells and skills he can learn later and how his values are distributed (attack, defense, intellect). Our hero will be the only one in the course of the game, we cannot recruit any more, only troops. The skillful structure of our protagonist is all the more important. Its skill tree is divided into three categories: power, magic and spirit, each of which can be increased multiple times and is dependent on one another, ten to twelve skills. Sounds complicated, but you quickly understand. An example: We want to learn the magic ability "necromancy", which automatically revives some of our fallen after a fight. For this we need on the one hand the skills "Chaos Magic" and "Concentration", on the other hand a certain number of runes - quasi the currency for increasing skills that we collect in the course of the game.

Reserve bank

Even now, the leveling of our loner is enormously motivating, so that the missing second heroes do not matter. But there is more to it: Our warrior has a value called "leadership" - which determines how many units we can pack into a troop pile. A very important point, because we can only take five types of troops into battle, so all five should be well represented. We also increase leadership by collecting flags on the map, carrying corresponding artefacts with us or moving up a level. We can buy fresh troops, but we cannot produce them ourselves, because in King's Bounty we don't have our own cities or castles.

A good team is all the more important: The five active troop types should consist of long-range and close-range fighters. In our games, it has also proven useful to always pack a magic-capable unit - for example, arch wizards who can "buff" their combat buddies with buffs. Assuming the appropriate talent, our hero can carry up to two additional stacks of troops and swap them before the fight in order to react to different opponents.

Extreme unction

As mentioned, the battles rage turn-based on hexes as in Heroes , but with one difference: As in the Fallout series, each unit has action points, usually two. Each move to an adjacent space, each unit spell costs one point, an attack order ends the turn immediately. Two points sound like little, but the number can be increased with good morals, spells or special skills. The looters unit, for example, masters the "race", which gives them two extra points once. There are often such talents - archers can shoot ice and fire arrows, for example, which either slow down their victims (target slides backwards in the turn order) or cause additional damage for a few rounds. We can support such actions with magic spells: "Slippery fog" tips oil on a target, also causes fire damage and makes it even more sensitive to further flame arrows.

Anger gives courage

Such magic-attack combos are fun, but it gets even better: In the course of the campaign (there is only one - but it's huge) we find a rage box that contains four rage spirits. We can use the first one for our fighting purposes, for the other three we have to solve our own quests first, such as stealing a magic clock from a dungeon. During a fight, our hero's anger rating increases - the more dead there are, the bigger the jump. We can use the collected points for an anger spell. At first the spirits only dominate relatively simple powers; the stone spirit conjures up an oversized rubble sword that rushes into a single target unit. But the four spirits also rise in levels and learn up to four sayings, which in turn can be increased. And the swamp spirit is chasing five predatory fish (!) Through the enemy lines in a fan shape, or the ice spirit conjures up a mechanical gizmo that heals its own troops and attacks enemy ones. Even the "normal" magic effects from the hero's repertoire are often beautifully animated, but the Zorngeist effects in particular are real eye-catchers!

Dragon with lock

In addition to the main story (will not be revealed) there are a lot of side quests. You can only get them through plain text windows, but it's worth reading: The tasks are sometimes really crazy. We are supposed to bring back a dragon's maiden who fled because the dragon could only offer an old cave instead of a dignified home. In the meantime he has built a castle for her - and we find out that the two of them have a son whose strange lizard eyes the new husband of the ex-virgin is already wondering about. We eliminate the bride and groom, send the dragon lover to her ex and the illegitimate son to the throne so that from now on he can sell us troops. There are often such wacky tasks: we free frogs from a dungeon because they no longer want to be kissed by a prince. In gratitude, the frog boss transforms into a chic woman that we can take with us - she then carries up to four more artifacts for us. We can even father up to four children with her, who then each occupy an artifact slot and bring additional bonuses. The fantasy business is really not what it used to be.