King’s Bounty: Armored Princess Review

Despite trying to convince myself otherwise, I’m not much of a PC strategy game kind of guy. Sure, I enjoyed Civilization IV for a bit, but it couldn’t hold me for more than a week. I played the bajeezus out of StarCraft, but that was back when I saw a new game every few months if I was lucky. Heck, I logged more hours on a borrowed copy of Dune II than I care to admit. These days, your run-of-the-mill real-time strategy game just doesn’t do anything for me. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II is a phenomenal game and I can clearly recognize the amount of polish on it, but it just isn’t for me.

Despite this, I always give special attention to strategy games that try to do things a bit differently (and yes I recognize Dawn of War II isn’t exactly a traditional RTS, but the mechanics are similar enough for me to not enjoy it). The Unholy War, a fairly middle-of-the-road PlayStation strategy game, held my attention for far longer than it should have. Games like Final Fantasy Tactics, though not groundbreaking by today’s standards, forever changed my expectations. And so it is with great pleasure that I introduce King’s Bounty: Armored Princess – a very special game.

Well, for the most part.

Armored Princess is the standalone expansion to King’s Bounty, a game that, for the most part, is the longer, slightly less refined version of this product. You take on the role of Princess Amelie just in time to witness the near destruction of your father’s kingdom. Obviously, the only way to rectify the situation is to use a magical doohickey to travel to another dimension in search of some guy who can make everything all right. And of course you weren’t supposed to be the one backpacking through portals, but hey, who wants to play as the senile wizard instead of the buxom warrior princess, who must be casting her own breed of spells to keep that chest piece on? You’ll meet colorful characters and walls of text as you set out on your very original journey.

To be fair, the writing is actually quite good. The game takes itself just seriously enough and does a decent job of incorporating humorous dialogue in what would be just another kingdom-on-the-brink fantasy yarn. Which is good, because you’ll be doing a lot of reading. There is no voice-over work and all quests are presented in that just-show-me-the-accept-button style we’ve all come to know and love in MMOs. Are the sound effects and music any good? Fairly, though the overly epic score does lose its luster rather quickly. The noticeable sound track restarts will likely become annoying to anyone with a musical ear as well. The sound is, in two words, quite average.

But honestly, you’re not here for the sound effects and music anyway. No one would blame you for playing this game with your headphones off and the latest Seinfeld rerun blaring in the background (you haven’t been to payroll yet?) And you’re definitely not here for the graphics either, which aren’t anything special. If you’re anything like me, you’ll think your World of WarCraft suddenly became plain old WarCraft with a very tiny splash of Diablo, and then you’ll end up confused as to why that actually makes sense. Indeed, this isn’t a game that’s going to floor you with any sort of visual tour-de-force. Animations are a bit stiff and textures aren’t anything special, but the style is pleasing, even if it is fairly standard fantasy. There’s not a lot of screen tearing or other graphical oddities, but there is occasional slowdown. Again, very average.

Combat and world exploration are the meat and potatoes of this experience, and whether or not this game’s approach to both gels with you will determine whether you drop 40 bones or uninstall the demo in disgust. As a warrior princess, you have the ability to gather a whole mess of troops and lead them on the battlefield. You have a set amount of leadership to disperse, which you can increase as you level up or through skills (more on those later). If you have a loyalty of 100 and a particular troop costs 10 loyalty per unit, you can have 10 of those units with you. If another unit costs five per, you can have 20 of them. Rinse and repeat until you have a maximum of five groups (plus two in reserve). The power of each squad is determined by their base stats and the number of units composing each grouping. Think of it as an expanded game of Risk: If you have a troop with 10 units against a troop with nine, the troop of 10 is likely to win, although you’ll lose units, and power, in the process.

You’ll explore the world from an isometric angle with all enemies viewable on the map, meaning you can pick when and where to fight. The world is composed of various islands, each filled with merchants, pirates, priests, kings, and lord knows what else, all willing to sell you units, items, spells, and give you quests. The object is to explore an island until you find a navigation chart (usually guarded by a very difficult group of enemies) that allows access to another island, where you begin your search anew until you reach the end of the game. Defeated enemies do not respawn, which creates an interesting dynamic as far as experience points and gold are concerned. Because your income is limited, each troop lost is just that much more painful. Spending 15,000 gold on a Black Dragon is a very big deal, and the loss of said dragon will send you into a quick-loading frenzy.

In order to lose your precious troops you’ll need to engage in combat, which is turn-based and takes place on a hexagonal grid. Every unit has a speed that determines the order of attack, and after everyone takes a swing the turn is over and another begins. Each turn you’re able to cast one spell, which vary from direct attacks to status ailments, and initiate one dragon attack. Yes, that’s right, early in the game you get your very own pet baby dragon, complete with his or her own set of special attacks and experience gain. Smack or get smacked by an enemy to build up your rage meter, which always you to call your dragon forth to do some truly devastating damage. In fact, the dragon is your most powerful asset, which is both a blessing and a curse. While early only he’ll jump in to drop a lightning orb or simply kick someone in the face, his later area-of-effect attack, Dragon Dive, is absolutely essential.

Besides your good buddy, you’ll need solid diversity amongst your troops’ ranks in order to stay competitive. Thankfully, there are plenty of troops to choose from. On the first island alone there are at least a dozen different units to choose from, with each progressive island introducing more. Move your troops across the field, bonk the other guys on the head and move on to the next fight. Considering the array of spells and skills at your disposal, combat is as deep an experience as you want it to be. Prefer to have a line of meatheads charging blindly into battle? There’s enough variety amongst the goblin and pirate hordes to make it happen. Want to throw in a few archers and healers? I’m certainly not going to stop you.

This, unfortunately, introduces one of the reasons why this game doesn’t come with a “guaranteed fresh” seal of approval. Let’s say you have 10 units, all of whom you take into battle. After celebrating your victory, you come to realize you only have two left. Two, unfortunately, is too few for the next battle, so you decide to buy more. Trouble is, this particular unit is only available on another island. So, back to the boat you go. Open up your map, click on the desired island, find the store and travel back. After. Every. Single. Battle. Obviously, this gets a bit old.

At the beginning of the game, you select to play as either a mage, warrior or paladin. Every class has access to the same skill trees, but each class gains a different amount of runes upon leveling up. A particular mage skill might take 7 blue runes to level up, but, as a warrior, you might only receive one blue rune per level. Sure, you’ll find a few scattered about the world, but nothing to make the grind any less painful. And, since enemies don’t respawn, grinding in the purest sense of the word just isn’t possible. This creates a balance issue between classes, as warriors and paladins get easier access to loyalty and power upgrades. The most obvious problem of them all is that your dragon’s rage meter is tied to the warrior tree. Why is this a big problem? Because at some point it becomes possible to upgrade your dragon skills too far. When your dragon levels up, you are presented with the choice to level up one of three skills; some might be brand skill while some might be upgrades to a current skill. Let’s assume your rage meter has a maximum level of 15 and your Dragon Dive skill uses 13 points to execute. Upon leveling up, you accidentally choose to raise Dragon Dive, increasing its usage requirement to 16. Oops. Until you increase your rage capacity, you won’t be using that skill anymore, and that might make any progress next to impossible.

That’s not even mentioning the fact that you can recruit a companion to hold extra items and train your troops, or that you can outfit yourself with a plethora of items, some of which you can do battle with to upgrade – a mechanic you should recognize from the Disgaea series. This, the troop buying and the potential to screw up your character make this a surprisingly hardcore experience, and you can’t fully developers for adopting this approach. So, while I can’t say this is a game everyone will love and adore, I can say with certainty that those looking for a hybrid strategy game that features a surprising amount of depth and a lengthy story could do much, much worse. If you’re more of an RTS player, there’s nothing special here. If turn-based games are more your speed, this is one you should certainly take a look at. Is it a classic? No. Is it decent fun for 20 to 30 hours? Absolutely.

Note: It should be noted that I did experience occasional computer-locking crashes during the course of playing. Due to the game’s fairly frequent auto saving and my usual quick-saving ways, I lost only a few minutes of playtime at most. Still, crashes are crashes and they are certainly annoying. I don’t know if this is a problem with the game as a whole or if it’s due to some reaction to my computer’s configuration, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this potential problem.