The game is good at informing you about the potential outcomes of your actions, so I would often chew on turns for ages, trying to minimise my losses the best I could. You position your units, and then take turns with the enemy to whittle down everyone's health bars, while your hero chips in occasionally with a powerful spell. While previous Bounty battles took place on tiny hex-based grids, here those grids have been expanded, and embellished with different levels of elevation, and various line-of-sight blocking obstacles. They're there, in your back pocket, as you clomp around the world, popping out every so often to dutifully fight on your behalf. In King's Bounty, you hire nameless soldiers to do your dirty work, including human swordsmen and archers, beasts such as wolves and bears, and even undead skeletons and ghouls.
When you do choose to engage in combat, you're told exactly which enemies to expect, and how strong they are compared to your current party. If I didn't find much humour in the writing, then it's here in the game mechanics, as 1C retains the series' essence in its brave new 3D world. But the absolute best part of the glowing barriers is that the bandits or skeletons, bears or elemental creatures will scamper out and waggle their weapons as you approach the border, like playground bullies in a Beano comic strip. There's no time pressure to engage with baddies, nor any risk of a surprise attack as you serenely wander through this fantasy world.
Remember those enemies I mentioned, the ones waiting politely behind their glowing barriers? It's a feature common to games with strategic maps, and I admire developer 1C Entertainment for using it in a more grounded setting, even at the risk of undermining the sacred immersion. However, if you approach it from another angle-as an ambitious reworking of the core King's Bounty concept-there's more to be hopeful about. From what I've seen of the game, I think it will suffer when compared to modern open world RPGs, for which a 'living, breathing world' is of paramount importance.
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