Last week the company 1C Entertainment provided editorial staff GameMAG.ru the opportunity to get acquainted with a demo version of a tactical role-playing game King’s Bounty II… And on its basis, preliminary conclusions can already be drawn.
The Kingdom of Nostria is going through hard times. During the Ecumenical Council, a certain prophet teleports to the palace, who announces to the dumbfounded nobles about the impending troubles in the country, and also points to the person who is destined to become the Savior. At this moment, King Claudius becomes ill, and the guards, by order of the prince, send the chosen one of the soothsayer to prison.
Six months later, Nostria is indeed facing a crisis. Bandits rule the roads, mana wells run dry, the dead get out of their graves, frightened by a certain Emptiness. And after the incident at the magofactory, Prince Adrian gives the order to release the protagonist from prison in order to deal with the problem.
In its atmosphere, King’s Bounty II resembles a mixture of The Witcher and Dragon age inquisition, but the developers do not show blood and severed limbs. At the same time, the world turned out to be quite distinctive. For example, in Nostria, magic plays such an important role that mass production of golems was launched to help people. Separately, it is worth noting an excellent soundtrack that harmonizes well with the world.
At the start, the player can choose one of three characters, but the developers asked journalists to run for the former knight of the Royal Guard Aivara, which can be seen in all commercials. The two remaining characters are a noble magician girl who was deprived of power over the county by her nephew, and a peasant paladin with the Jeanne d’Arc complex. Heroes differ from each other in class characteristics and basic set of skills, and also behave differently in dialogues.
The basics of gameplay are taught in a winter location near the prison. King’s Bounty II can be conditionally divided into two components. The main character explores the world in real time, while the camera hangs behind him. But battles with enemies take place in turn-based mode on a field consisting of hexes.
Structurally, the game is very similar to 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.
The only nuance is that King’s Bounty II does not offer to move along one route. The locations turned out to be large, and in some places branch routes are available, thanks to which you can avoid some fights. Caches, side quests, villages, mana wells, dungeons, portals, chests and so on are scattered everywhere.
As you explore the world around you, the character is pumped, finds new equipment and acquires his own small army. At the same time, no more than five squads of units can be under the command of a player (the rest are sent to the reserve), and how many people / creatures are represented in one squad depends on the leadership indicator.
The character development system turned out to be not quite standard. The fact is that you can choose from four paths of development at once: Order, Anarchy, Strength and Magic. And everyone affects the world around them and the army under their control.
The followers of the path of Order try to help the oppressed and maintain the appearance of the law in the lands of Nostria. Supporters of Anarchy cooperate with criminals and put their interests ahead of the interests of society. Force supporters seek to solve problems in fair combat, while Magicians can make the task easier through tricks and arcane arts.
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, but it is better if the army has units of the same category. In addition, if the character has gone far along the path of Anarchy, it will not be liked by the units of Order, Strength and Mastery, respectively.
All the choices in the game are tied to this system. What to do? Contact your local crime boss or head to the other end of the map for refugee help? Return the seal to the undead or fight them? Give the pig saved from the trolls to a swindler or peasants? The choice is made not through dialogues, but interaction with objects and characters.
At the same time, the path of Order / Anarchy in quests is separated from the path of Strength / Mastery, thanks to which skills can be combined. For completing tasks, the character not only receives skill points, but can also unlock more powerful skills.
The battles in King’s Bounty II turned out to be compact. The arenas themselves are quite small, but they can differ markedly due to the terrain. In addition, you need to think about the placement of your units so that they do not interfere with the passage. For example, archers / mages can be placed on a hill so that they can fire at enemies from afar. However, they can be hampered by debris on the map, which obscures the view.
Each unit turn is divided into a move phase and an attack phase. If any of this is not involved, the units can be ordered to defend. In addition, the squad has a set of its own skills: healing, enhanced attacks, and so on.
The player’s character does not directly participate in combat, although he influences the units due to his characteristics. Each round is also allowed to use a spell or magic scroll. For example, you can poison an enemy squad, strengthen allies, summon additional creatures to help, and so on. The indicator of mana is finite: a limited amount of resources is allocated for the fight, and it simply cannot be restored, because in Nostria the mana wells are gradually emptying.
The difficulty of the fights varies. The map contains both simple fights and difficult tasks that will make you think about actions. This is usually associated with some kind of assignment. For example, on the second location there is a rebellious nobleman’s castle, who has several squads of crossbowmen under his control, and there is very little room for maneuver. Juggling squads before the battle is not superfluous, as the developers show the strength of the enemy squads. For example, sometimes it is worth giving up magic units, replacing them with a squad of dogs.
Units also have their own specialization. Crossbowmen are able to quickly destroy mages, but in close combat they feel bad. Horse archers can approach, attack the enemy and retreat to a safe distance, but they are helpless against dogs. Certain spells can also be more effective against specific enemies.
If during the battle the squad was badly battered, but it was not destroyed, then after the end of the battle the losses can be quickly filled by paying for the treatment with gold. Otherwise, you will have to look for a merchant recruiter.
The main efforts of 1C Entertainment were clearly focused on the development of maps. And some really turned out to be beautiful. This is best seen in the second location, where you can walk around the city, get to settlements by the river, stumble upon some ruins, a magical aqueduct, or even go down into the dungeons. It is important to study the environment, because the player constantly needs gold to recruit units or buy new equipment.
The main question is – is it interesting to play King’s Bounty II? The answer is yes, interesting. Moreover, the game has a “sticky effect”, so it is quite difficult to come off.
However, you need to understand that we have an AA project here. The locations turned out to be very beautiful, but many secondary units can look like clones, which differ from each other in clothing and the presence / absence of a beard. They are poorly animated, which is especially evident in the faces. However, in the cutscenes, the situation is getting better. In this regard, the game strongly resembles The Witcher 2. On the other hand, there is no soulless horror in the spirit Mass Effect Andromeda.
The speed of movement of the character also looks a controversial decision. The hero is extremely leisurely, and his local version of Roach does not improve the situation much. At the same time, the developers have confirmed that this is a conscious decision. Apparently, they did not want the jet-powered player to run through the location in a few minutes, constantly bumping into the arenas of battles, but measuredly studied the environment.
We should also talk about optimizing and polishing the game separately. King’s Bounty II works on Unreal Engine 4, so it requires a lot of resources. However, there is enough room for maneuver.
The preview version was launched on a laptop with an 8th generation Intel Core i7 processor, a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card and 8GB of memory, and the installation was carried out on the HDD. With this configuration, we were quite able to play comfortably at medium-high settings (several combinations were tried), although we should forget about the stable 60 frames per second. The main test was the city of Marcellus.
In-game settings are flexible enough, and the difference between medium and high settings is not very noticeable, but it does improve performance. The exception is shadows, because when the parameters are reduced, their quality is seriously reduced.
The combination of image rendering scaling and TAA anti-aliasing method produces a fairly clean picture. Since in the game many characters sport beards and mustaches, and wild animals have fur, you should not give up TAA-smoothing.
But the ability to fix the frame rate at 30 frames per second let down one of the problems of UE4 – incorrect framing. This is a little annoying because we prefer stability to a bouncing frame counter. Perhaps, on the release, the flaw will be corrected, since the console versions will be fixed at 30 frames.
No serious bugs were noticed during the preview. Only in one place there were problems with the logic of choice (due to a conversation with the character, one of the options for solving the quest became unavailable), however, at 1C Entertainment we were given to understand that the task would be corrected. By the release, the developers also promise to finalize the animations, seriously improve performance, update the visual range, reduce download times, and so on.
The preview version of King’s Bounty II leaves very positive emotions behind. Yes, certain budget constraints are visible. However, the developers tried to correctly allocate resources, focusing on gameplay and exploration of the surrounding world. The result is a pretty solid role-playing game that is hard to break away from.
King’s Bounty II will go on sale August 24, 2023 on PC, Xbox One, PS4 and Nintendo Switch.
See also: How 1C wants to resurrect the Russian igroprom: King’s Bounty II Preview
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