Reimagining the original King’s Bounty from Katauri Interactive many players in the CIS have sunk into the soul. They still remember the time they spent playing with nostalgia and warmth. But everything flows and everything changes. And now already 1C Entertainment decided to restart the franchise with King’s Bounty II… The result was strong but mixed.
Let’s say right away – we did not have time to complete the game to the end (less than a third of the plot remained), so a full review will be published later. Before you – the impressions of the editorial board GameMAG.ru after going through about 25 hours of content…
The Kingdom of Nostria is on the verge of collapse. During the Ecumenical Council, an incident occurs – a maddened elf-prophet appears in the middle of the throne room. He broadcasts about the approach of a great misfortune, from which only the main character, who was present at the event, can save. At this moment the king Claudius it becomes bad, the prophet flees, and the guards grab the newly-appeared Savior.
Six months later, the protagonist is released from prison by order of Prince Adrian. He is ordered to investigate the causes of the mysterious incident that destroyed the Magofactoria, unravel the conspiracy and stop the threat called the Void, because of which the dead rise from the tombs, and the mana reserves in the kingdom are gradually depleted.
The player is given three heroes to choose from: a former knight of the Royal Guard Aivar, Countess-magician Katarina and a peasant paladin Elsa… Each of them has starting bonuses: Aivar tends to melee, Katarina relies on magic, and Elsa is the fastest to accumulate the Leadership parameter, which affects the number of units in the squad.
But you need to understand that all three characters are masked difficulty levels. What’s the point? The player has four paths of development: Order, Anarchy, Strength and Mastery. Each of them has its own set of skills and a set of armies.
To level up, you must not only gain experience, but also make a moral choice. Did you help the bandit, but did not report the crime to the guard? Get Anarchy Points. Did you decide not to storm the outpost with brute force, but to look for ingredients for the ritual of summoning the Eagles? You are an adept of Mastery!
In fact, the character moves along two paths of development, because Anarchy is opposite to Order, and Strength is opposite to Mastery. The choices in the tasks are divided accordingly.
For each of the four paths of development, there is a set of units that do not interact well with each other. Penalties can be reduced by investing a few points in the starting Order skill bar available to all characters.
We decided to play as Katarina, following the Anarchy / Mastery route, which turned out to be not for the faint of heart. The fact is that this development path is a kind of hard mode.
You see, the units of Order (knights, magicians, crossbowmen) turned out to be the most versatile: a large number of units, useful skills, and so on. Force units (beasts, gnomes, trolls) are more effective in close combat. But the armies of Anarchy (bandits and undead) turned out to be rather frail and highly tailored for specific tasks. Their shortcomings have to be compensated for by units of Mastery (spirits, golems and elementals). Although they are fat, there are quite a few of them in the detachment.
As a result, the countess’s army regularly suffered losses, which created serious problems. Units also gain experience, but for killing enemies. But if the detachment completely dies, then it does not receive experience. Because of this, it takes longer to unlock new unit skills.
Some people may not like this. However, for the challengers, the game turns into a kind of puzzle. It is necessary to think over in advance a plan of action in battle, using the strengths of your units and trying to neutralize the actions of your opponents.
The book of spells also becomes a weighty argument. By spending mana points and pumping one of the four schools of magic, the player will be able to buy especially powerful spells. For example, our countess could summon a powerful Chimera once per battle, capable of radically changing the nature of the battle. And it helped out more than once.
The battles take place in turn-based mode in compact arenas divided into hexes. In total, five squads from each side take part in the battle. One squad of allies can come to the aid of the player at certain points, drawing off some of the attacks. One more detachment is allowed to additionally summon with the help of a spellbook.
The player needs to correctly place the units using the terrain features. Let’s say archers should be placed on a hill so that they fire at opponents from a height. It is better to hide especially valuable units behind some destroyed tower in order to protect against attacks of archers or magicians. In some battles, it is also necessary to separate the units from each other in order to protect them from the enemy’s magical attacks that hit the area.
A player will be able to use a spell once or use a magic scroll per round. And with maximum pumping, the Mastery paths will allow you to use magic twice per round, which can become a serious argument in battle.
The equipment that a character finds or buys affects units as well. Moreover, there are several sets, collecting which, you can activate additional abilities. For example, the attire of the archmage will allow you to summon a whirlwind at the beginning of the battle.
A non-standard feature of King’s Bounty II is that magic disappears rapidly in Nostria. Therefore, the mana reserve is finite, and in battles it is limited. However, adepts of the Path of Mastery can increase the score.
Financial control is also an important aspect. For gold, you can buy units, equipment and scrolls. However, the flow of money is rather meager, as a result of which you constantly have to make difficult choices. If, at the end of the battle, the detachment of units does not die, then for gold you can immediately restore losses on the spot.
But if the detachment died, then you need to look for sellers. And in the case of Anarchy / Mastery, this is also a problem, as their recruiters are scattered all over the map. In addition, new and more powerful units are unlocked as you complete tasks and advance across the map. At the same time, merchants can have exclusive units, but in limited numbers. And if you are unlucky, then you can stay in a difficult situation without a trump card up your sleeve.
Kingdom of Nostria turned out to be quite picturesque. There are two maps available for research in King’s Bounty II. The first is a training location where the basics of gameplay are taught. The hero runs through a picturesque winter forest, stumbles upon bandits, explores abandoned villages and even meets a dragon.
The second map is Nostria itself: the noisy capital of Marcellus, the Tower of the Magicians, the bandits’ camp, the swamps, the Magofaktoria destroyed by the “atomic explosion” and so on. The location turned out to be very pleasant to the eye, and it is interesting to explore it.
Moving around the world itself resembles Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle – the character moves along the corridors that alternate with battle arenas. It even looks quite similar, because the battle zones are often separated by a line, and the player can see in advance which units he will have to fight with.
Traveling around the world, the player finds various caches, teleportation stones, enhancement steles, mana wells, shops, and also meets local residents who can and should be helped in solving problems. As such, there is no dialogue system in King’s Bounty II.
Instead, you have to interact with objects or characters, confirming your choice associated with one of the four aforementioned paths. The tasks turned out to be the most diverse – skirmishes with bandits, research into ancient ruins, detective stories, searches for a missing pig, rare books, and so on and so forth.
A separate type of mission is the test of the Prophet. We are being transferred under the control of an ancient hero who once faced the Void. Such missions are a kind of chess tasks. The player is in the minority, so it is necessary to use the resources wisely, having figured out the logic of the developers. For example, in one of the tasks it is necessary to control only two powerful units and force the enemy’s army to gather in a heap in order to use strikes on the area.
The character in King’s Bounty II moves very leisurely, as the authors clearly tried to slow down the progress of the game. Help in the form of a horse does not really solve the problem. The fact is that the local Roach is extremely reluctant to turn around, and within the city limits it even goes to a step, which is incredibly annoying.
For 30 hours of the game, the GameMAG.ru editors studied most of the content. However, unforeseen difficulties arose along the way, associated with strange game design decisions that could add a couple of gray hairs to the head.
The fact is that the developers treated autosaves in a very strange way. They occur as rarely as possible (usually when finding a teleport and before the start of the battle), and sometimes you can get into a loophole if the player decides to change his mind in the mission.
If you lose the battle, you will be thrown to the nearest teleportation stone without units. In this case, the enemy will completely restore his army, which can put the player in a hopeless position. Why the possibility of refitting was not provided is a mystery.
Because of this, our editorial office almost had a softlock, and therefore did not manage to submit the review on time. Having lost in one of the battles, we survived unsuccessfully, left without an army and with a very limited amount of money. There was nowhere to get the resources, and there were two difficult battles ahead, blocking further progress. However, the developers themselves argue that a softlock in King’s Bounty II is impossible, because you just need to choose the right tactics.
It took us about three hours to find a solution. Therefore, the victory was really hard-won. In the future, the situation did not improve – there is constantly not enough money, and in the final third of the game, light fights disappear, which is why the squads regularly die. That is why for the first passage it is worth choosing the path of Order, not Anarchy – otherwise you risk getting unnecessary problems.
In addition, it is worth focusing on the development of a specific skill tree, because it will greatly facilitate the passage. The game provides the ability to reset skills. The first attempt is free, but for the second one they already ask for as much as 10 thousand coins, which is too much, given the shortage of money.
Graphically, the game looks nice, although you need to understand that we have an AA project based on Unreal Engine 4… Therefore, the animations cannot be called first-class, and clones with minimal facial expressions often flash among in-game characters. We also highly recommend playing on PC.
The fact is that when porting the project to consoles, 1C Entertainment overdid it with optimization, which makes some cuts look like overkill. In the game, the range of drawing, the quality of textures and the detail of models are severely cut.
Therefore, King’s Bounty II looks extremely sloppy on Xbox and Playstation systems. Periodically, the player will stumble upon square shadows and eerie quality stone walls, and ugly sprite trees from The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion…
Incomprehensible is happening with distant objects. Let’s say Marcellus looks like a blurry box made of a pair of polygons from afar. But the nearby tower of magicians escaped such victims, which is especially noticeable if you find a suitable observation post.
The main problem is the image quality. It seems that the developers screwed up with the reconstruction of the picture. Objects have a clearly visible “ghost trail”, and when the character moves, some pixels appear along the contour. The anti-aliasing quality is also not selected to the maximum,
Worst of all was the Xbox One version. Due to the lower resolution, even a snowflake flying by can turn an image into a pixel mess. On the PS4 Pro, the situation is slightly better, but not much. In addition, fog that appears in places where the Void is present can bring down the performance of old systems. The problem with streaming textures is also relevant – especially in cutscenes, when entire buildings do not have time to load.
The next-gen console versions haven’t received any major improvements, so the Xbox One version is launching on the Xbox Series S. The best console option remains the Xbox One X / Xbox Series X version, which runs at significantly higher resolutions to minimize noise issues. The trump card of the new systems is also fast loading, which will greatly help out when passing the tests of the Prophet.
We add that a laptop, even with a video card of the level of GTX 1050 Ti, is still the preferred option for passing King’s Bounty II. At medium settings, the resulting picture is head and shoulders above the console counterparts. What’s happening on the Nintendo Switch is anyone’s guess.
If we talk about bugs, then the game is pretty licked, so nothing critical was noticeable. The only thing, in one of the side quests, for some reason, there was no solution option associated with the path of Anarchy. There were also minor glitches with animations: a servant in the castle carried a tray of drinks in one hand, and some female characters poke their eyes.
King’s Bounty II cannot be called a masterpiece for all time, but she knows how to pull in and not let go. Therefore, the 1C Entertainment project must find its audience. But you need to understand that King’s Bounty II has difficult battles, and pumping requires maximum concentration from the player. Otherwise, you can get completely stuck during the passage.
The release of King’s Bounty II will take place on August 24, 2023 on PC, Xbox One, PS4 and Nintendo Switch.
Read also: Galloping Nostria: First Look at King’s Bounty II
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