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...
