March out of RPG month: King's Bounty, Warriors of the North

Sequels are a nice thing. (Sometimes)

The first recent King's Bounty game, King's Bounty: The Legend, is one of those little fist pump moments Steam has brought to me. Like a fair number of old school gamers, one of my favorite games is Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which King's Bounty has a claim in the lineage of. HoMM4 was fine, but not as good, then HoMM5 just felt off somehow.  I didn't play enough of HoMM5 to really nail it down, but I know for a fact that HoMM games are supposed to take place on a hex map. I realize that sounds awfully specific and nit-picky, but the way units line up, block and defend is at the core of why I enjoy HoMM games. Getting the positioning juuuuust right and so on ... Just what makes the game "good" to me. HoMM5 didn't do that, and instead combat felt weird and I almost want to say floaty. Not floaty in the genuine pseudo physical lack of feedback feeling you get in an action game, but the step after, where your brain tries to process through the floatiness.

KB:TL stepped up to fill the hole in my heart. I bought it for 7.50. containing all of the (at the time) newly made KB content. My understanding is that KB:TL and Armored Princess are only KB games through purchasing the name, but I just enjoyed them so much I barely care. They're very HoMM-like, but in many ways discard the elements that make the game feel less story-driven than they should. Admittedly, AP is a worse game than TL, and then it has later revisions and expansions that in turn just make it even worse. Crossworlds was such an awful edition, at least to single player. Does this game have multiplayer? I don't even begin to know.

But then they released another sequel - Or more or less a campaign, packaged as its own thing. I gotta admit that there's only a handful of series I get excited about seeing new releases in - Crysis, for one. The Witcher 2 got me pretty hyped, and I guess I'm a bit interested to see how SimCity 5 is going to be. There's probably more but if I can't think of them. So another KB game, I'm hyped, etc.

Since it's almost impossible for me to dislike this game I'm going to be a bit more general about King's Bounty games, the more recent ones, and talk about why I really like them and the stuff I find sort of strange about watching the shift as modern influences drive their way into a game clearly made to follow up Heroes of Might and Magic 3. HoMM3 is, of course, always going to be a game that people go back to - It's a classic with enduring graphic quality, excellent soundwork and mostly a very good UI.

KB games take from that very intimately. In much the way a rip-off is called a loving homage if its a quality production...

King's Bounty: Warriors of the North (hereby called KB:WN) is essentially, as everything else in the series, two games at once. The two games only vaguely relate to each other - One influences what your guys do in the other, and the other influences your numbers going up or down.

The first part is a pretty traditional RPG. You have a guy, yours mans if you will, and in all the KB games this character is the protagonist whom gains levels, talks to people in towns, has talents and stats, and gold which you use to buy units. All KB games limited the army size of your hero by his "Leadership" score, which roughly defines the size of your army. In HoMM games the limiting factor is primarily troop production, which is better and worse in other ways. In this game, I remain fond of the leadership concept, since it makes sense a green commander just setting out isn't going to suddenly build an army of millions no matter how much gold he has. And in the late game, leadership starts to feel like pure logistical skill, so ok.

The talent tree in KB is one of my favorite ideas. Essentially, an amount of "runes" are generated per level - depending on your class - and you can spend those runes in each tree. However, talents often cost quite a few runes, and each talent tree does not only use its own runes. So spending talents becomes multilayered and interesting, at least in theory. Different KB games and classes have wildly different talent trees, so sometimes they're really well balanced and sometimes they're a bit disappointing.

The second is the larger meat and bones of the game: hex field war game action, with individuals representing larger or small armies of dudes. This is for better or worse the main thrust of the game, so if you don't like war slash strat games, it's like trying to play a FF game for the plot. Each successive KB game has added new factions and with them new units or entire new mechanics. By KB:WN the number of units is downright dizzying, and a given battle can face off against a whole score of different foes you've ever seen before. I believe the army list comprises Humans of the neutral - robbers and pirates -  knightly humans, animals of many types including snakes and dragons, Elves, Dwarves, Lizardmen, Demons, Undead, Orcs and finally the new race Vikings. WB:WN also adds "runes" as a mechanic, which is a system of consumables your Viking units can use in battle. WB:CR added adrenaline to the orc units, so there's just a bajillion things going on.

I believe the runes are Attack bonus, Defense Bonus and Luck bonus which I think is a chance for extra turns. Runes don't really add any complexity to the game, as units are already completely absurd in this game. There are almost no "basic" units. Skeletons, a unit most games portray as the most basic of all - immune as undead to many spells and effects, simple move, simple stats - have multiple powers and interactions. The melee infantry variant can sow the battlefield with "bone piles" and then teleport through them. The end result is a HoMM game with a myriad of units each with an endless assortment of possible scenarios. The presence of one unit can shift the value of other units dramatically, as powers turn off, aid, benefit or whatever other powers.

If you don't like the combat in this game you'll be pretty quick to tire of it. The game is grindy. Often, the correct choice to passing an enemy army is to fight five other armies, level up, spend your talents and then go back to it. This also sometimes creates a situation where you mentally skip over possible ends to quests, in favor of bashing into more enemies, until you - much like a fictional viking berserker, ha - look up from the corpses to realize you were supposed to go into a hut or talk to someone, ugh.

Like I said, KB:WN's new race is "Vikings", which seem like a mix of the ridiculous European myths and somewhat reasonable portrayal. The idea that the idea of medieval invaders, outside "Knights", is actually what Vikings look like, isn't something the creative centers of humanity have ever picked up on. I like the Viking units, much more than the other new army from Crossworlds, which was the ultra awful Orc hordes. The orcs were good in the other versions of the game, but becoming a "faction" just ... did them poorly. My only real complaint regarding the vikings is that the early game offers you almost nothing but Vikings - Not enough to really replace them with other units, anyway, without the morale penalty really getting your goat.

Vikings have goats, yes? You get a little sick of the viking units, except for the warrior maidens, which are women riding bears. They are bear cavalry.

Each of the KB games has a "summon" you use by expending a "rage" bar, which is gathered exactly like Rage in WoW is oy. The first game had very final fantasy style post-fantasy monsters that you had to undertake quests to gain access to. I really liked these, they had personalities, hinted at a larger universe and had very diverse abilities that while the later ones were more powerful I found myself using all of them for the whole game. Neat! The next game had, uh, a baby dragon you ... were promised would grow up ... and instead looked like that thing from MLP for its whole lifespan. Also his abilities were kinda boring, especially compared to the first expansion, which had you summoning a technowizard ice maiden, a lost prince from a dead race of ancient reptiles and an incarnation of Death.

KB:WN has "Valkyries", which are somewhere between the two. The Valkyries are talkative, have personalities (though they seem to hover between Hello I am Awesome and Would like Burn tHiNgs??) and have out of battle abilities that you have to pre-select, which I want to say is new. I never remember to use these. The valkyries are basically Danish super models with huge swords or bows or whatever, but they're still visually detailed and well animated for that. Except the one Valkyrie, the first one you get, just spins around when you summon her. It's a bit odd. Her ability, which puts a pile of loot onto the battlefield, is an interesting snare though.

The game's story has you playing a viking youth who is the younger son of a viking king, though he's a king of like one island so kinda not really. One thing I like about the game is just how wacky your character's dialogue is. He's kind of dumb and he says a bunch of kind of dumb stuff. It's refreshing to play a protagonist who A) Isn't a super genius except when he's not B) Has a Beard C) References how damn manly his beard is. The story itself is basically explained on the box - You're a viking exploring the world and fighting oh my god so many undead. I think by halfway through the game I'd actually killed millions of undead. Like all KB games the dialogue and characters can be a little different - Sometimes people try to get you killed. Sometimes, you get ambushed. Other times orcs fall in love. One thing I miss is the "significant other" feature from the other two games, even if it was a little weird. Less weird in Armored Princess, as strange as that sounds. Like I'm glad you can't have babies in this one, but it was sort of a cute different feature. The relationships, not the babies. Interestingly this game references the womanizing ways of the hero in the first game, which comes off as pretty hilarious. Some of the weirder marriages get brought up, like Bill Gilbert marrying a zombie woman.
 
KB:WN has its own introductory area, which I think is probably the strongest part of the game. Eventually you return to the world of the first game, or at least its areas. It's neat seeing a rendition of the first game thirty or forty years later following several major disasters, but it's also a bit repetitive. The original game's world isn't all that big and KB:WN chews it down a little, cutting out various quests and dungeons. The thing also is that, because the game kinda well, blows its load early, the number of grindy fights become extraordinarily dull. Mid to large sized vs mid to large sized battles are just ... Not interesting. I blame normal mode more than anything, but it's strange seeing normal mode because piss easy.

KB:WN does carry a fairly large number of flaws, perhaps more than the other two main entries in the series. The Valkyrie out of battle abilities are out of the way, buried in dialogue trees. Their abilities are poorly explained - The game's translation is, admittedly, very fan level. It doesn't hurt the gameplay and I certainly don't feel it makes the game worse, but it means I can't recommend this as the first game for new players. The game simply has boats and boatloads of complexity, much of which just isn't well explained and there's a fair it of trial and error. The game is loaded with content to the point of absurdity, but it suffers a little in that some numbers do not seem quite ... Balanced. XP rewards in the midgame are a little pointless, and loot hits  a plateau pretty quickly. The game in general has a serious issue with plateauing - You reach "the midgame" very early on then spend a fair amount of time gradually transitioning into the top end game. Then there's hours of content past that while you slam into underprepared and underpowered enemy armies.

It feels weird to complain a game is too long, but because KB:WN plateaus so quickly you just get used to destroying army after army in this sort of repetitive grind. The game is frustrating in how distant resupply of your soldiers can be, forcing very delicate maneuvers.

The game has a couple odd bugs, too. Music, for one, plays at the weirdest times. In the first game there's specific tracks for certain areas. The second campaign adds more tracks but again, they're for specific spots. KB:WN has no interest in this. It just plays random music whenever it feels like, which makes the game feel sloppy in parts. The Elf forest music plays while you're tromping around Hell and like ... what? Also, the counterattack 'favorite of the gods' can trigger opposing counterattacks, which can chain repeatedly as the demon smacks you over and over. As you progress you hit more and more odd little typos and other mistakes. It is after not produced by native english speakers, but it's rare to see problems in the dialogue. It's other stuff, like missing notes on weapons or oddly misplaced strings. I think the game didn't much care for my Xonar drivers, but I did the install and it seems to have fixed that up.

KB:WN is pretty good all in all. It's clearly the weakest when compared to TL and AP, but no worse for wear than CW which was pretty much the same thing to AP as WN is to TL. As expansions go it may simply be too long, way too fucking long, but the real issue is one of game balancing. On normal, which I regret playing on, the game goes into the mid to late game plateau very early on and then just skids forward without any sense of progression.

Seriously though, I wrote this in part over the month of playing it. I started after I'd gotten to what I'd imagined was "the main island" and out of the 10 hours long tutorial. There's another fifty hours I've played past that, and I'm not even at the end! Phew, I need a break, I'll come back to this game in a couple months after I can enjoy KB games again. Both Crysis 3 and SimCity were released during the expanse of playing two thirds through the game, but I kinda like talking like those were positive things to come as opposed to what we got.