King's Bounty The Legend

Minimum System Requirements

Pentium IV 3000 MHz or analogous AMD Processor; 1Gb RAM; Nvidia GF7800 with 256Mb or analogous ATI Videocard


The basic premise behind King's Bounty: The Legend is simple, and rather weak. The kingdom has fallen on hard times and is in need of a hero. Monster attacks are way up and travel is impeded by the appearance of numerous bandit gangs. The task of finding out what is going on falls on your shoulders. Oh, and there's something about the king's magical daughter... but really, who can tell. The underlying story is enough to get you from place to place though trying to decipher any meaning out of the typo-ridden, poorly written text is a challenge.

The combat that takes place between story segments is great and worth the effort. Although you create a character from one of three classes (Warrior, Wizard, Paladin), you act as an off-field commander for the rag-tag group of units that decide to join you along the way. As you travel around the world, you'll run into forts and castles that you must clear, usually as part of a long quest. Once cleared, the forts produce units and other benefits for your ongoing efforts.

Between battles, you assign attributes to your main character. Might is linked to strength and Magic unlocks new spell abilities. The last attribute, Mind, is similar to "Luck" in other games and allows you to earn experience at an increased rate. Additionally, each class can learn specialized skills as they level up and have different advantages. Knights are incredible melee fighters, while bandits can teleport.

One major issue I had with the game is the overworld map. Like the story, it is good enough to get your where you are going, though it is impossible to know what is going on. Important landmarks, like cities, aren't marked clearly enough. About halfway through the game, I accidentally figured out that markers could be placed on the map. Unfortunately, this isn't mentioned in the tutorial.