Just finished a run of this game on hard difficulty, took me about two solid weeks of play to get through (I pretty much cleared everything and did every quest) and had a fantastic time with it. It's no shocker that I fell hard for this game-I loved Space Rangers 2, the team's last work-and adore the HoMM series and its allies.
I just want to say, though, it was SO nice to play a strategy game where the game properly scaled up the encounters as you go to compensate for the player's growing familiarity with the game's mechanics and statistics. Every time I felt I was preparing tactics and combos that I thought might be "absuing the game" , the game comes back with megastacks of enemies so nasty that it was necessary to use them. As the kind of guy who uses spreadsheets with strategy games from time to time, it was awesome to see a game that wouldn't just collapse under its own formulae four hours in like most I play do. The pacing was perfect as well, and the game always gave you plenty of interesting monsters and spells with which to mix and match your army.
Honestly, the one thing that I wish the game had done a little bit more for was itemization. Even this was pretty robust, but had they really blown the doors off for more customizable via keeper battles and a large number of items with more varied stats, it would have given the player even more interesting army/spell combos to play with.
Another thing that hit me as I played was how polished the game felt. Normally playing Eastern European titles always has some things that drag down the experience-evil islands style voice acting, crash bugs, inexplicably choppy framerates on beefy hardware. KB really didn't suffer from any of this and the game looked pleasant and ran great (without being at all demanding). Instead of voice acting 1c instead got some compentent translators and the game was MUCH better off for it. The music was also good all the way through and never really came across as repetitive or tiresome.
Definitely one of the stronger strategy game releases this year, if not the strongest, right up there with Europa Universalis III: In Nomine and Sins of a Solar Empire. If you want something besides evilbore and porno to keep your attention at your PC this holiday season, you really can't go wrong with King's Bounty.
