King's Bounty 2 Review

There have been a lot of returns and revivals for well-known franchises like Age of Empires, Knights of Honor and King's Bounty this year, although there have been a few minor spin-offs in the franchise over the past couple of decades. The increasing interest in strategy gaming is making it a great time to bring back old and new IPs. But can King's Bounty 2 revive this classic series and revitalize its legacy?

King's Bounty 2 lets players play the role of one or more of three characters: Aivar, Katharine, the ambitious countess Katharine and Elisa. They're referred to as the saviors in Nostria's fantasy kingdom. The quests will require players to make morality-shifting choices, engage in combat, search for loot, secrets, and take part in tactical skirmishes.

King's Bounty 2 offers plenty of content that players can explore and enjoy. The only positive thing about the long-awaited sequel is that it's serviceable (with caveats), frustrating and immersion-breaking. It can also be exhausting.

King's Bounty 2's core game design is where it really falls apart. Its role-playing and narrative feel dull, uninteresting, and archaic. Only Elisa's motivations and connections to the story make role-playing enjoyable. Aivar feels like a brick wall and Katharine feels unnatural, despite her best writing and voice acting.

There are two main approaches to character role-playing design. One is the blank slate approach, where the player's actions determine their character. The other is the focused approach, where players experience the story through a defined character such as the Witcher series. These are more like guidelines than rules, as many role-playing games use a mixture of both. King's Bounty 2 seems to have tried to find the perfect balance for their characters design. However, they're not memorable enough and don't allow enough freedom for players or the ability to make them their own.

1C's main method of giving players the freedom to develop their characters is by providing a morality system that offers four paths. However, this can be disappointing and too shallow. This system is a window dressing system that allows for skill unlocking and upgrades, but it doesn't reflect the character's morality. Although it will lock actions for the opposite path if enough morality points are earned, it feels incomplete and lacks character impact.

King's Bounty 2's exploration, travel, and quests feel restricted due to its linearity. Because of the game's lackluster loot and ridiculously simple puzzles, exploration isn’t particularly engaging. There isn't much to explore that's off the beaten track. The player doesn't have to pay attention to find hidden treasures or care about collecting books and scrolls explaining the world's history.

These systems are plagued by incessant backtracking, which makes it an exhausting task. King's Bounty 2's pacing is slowed down by slow travel speeds, poor location of fast travel destinations, one-and done vistas, and the absence of events or anything that breaks up the monotony. It was like I was playing an old MMO, but with no nostalgia to mask the slow pace.

It doesn't help that this control system is inefficient and clunky. This is especially evident in army management, where there are many UI inefficiencies as well as fiddly controls. It's hard to pay attention to the Nostria world while you are fighting with controls.

The game's narrative is dull and boring. It has no interesting storylines. While there is undoubtedly a central mystery surrounding a conspiracy and a mysterious magic plague that corrupts the land and saps the world of mana it's not worth the grind to find the end.

King's Bounty 2's initial premise has the player character beginning as a prisoner and being given the task of investigating the kingdom's problems to help them regain their freedom. This old trope takes away character agency and makes it difficult to care for the main character or their taskmasters. The player is also called the savior in this kingdom. This is another tired trope that reduces King's Bounty 2's already limited replayability.

Although these well-worn narrative lines could have been compelling, the playable characters are often poorly defined and uninteresting. They do not add any value to the story or give it any new meaning. It is doubly disappointing to see so little storytelling potential. There are some great world-building ideas like the presence of golems within daily society, which gives the world a sci-fi-fi feel. Also, multiple dimensions and planes give the world an extra dimension and plane. Magic is used as a fuel source and everyday tool in many aspects.

King's Bounty 2 isn't all doom & gloom. The combat is the main highlight, even though it has its flaws. The small-scale skirmishes are lacking in innovation but each battle is interesting because of the variety of units, maps, abilities, spells, and other elements. Even with careful preparation, some engagements can be quite difficult and offer players the chance to practice their tactical decision-making skills.

King's Bounty 2's combat is too sparse to make it a challenging game. Combat is too sparingly used and the game's dynamism is eventually lost to King's Bounty 2's poor design choices.

Combat is a problem because you can only cast spells, which severely limits player choices. This is fine for magically-oriented characters. But, it's not the best choice for Elisa and Aivar, who are more dependent on their physical abilities than Katharine. They can only cast spells which reduces combat depth. Aivar is portrayed as being magically unskilled, but he is skilled in all things war. This breaks immersion.

Apart from magical ability and army stat buffs, the effect of character equipment on combat is minimal. This not only limits players' tactical options but also makes it very important, particularly non-magical equipment. It can be frustrating to see characters with shiny new swords or crossbows who are unable to use them on the battlefield to aid their troops. This makes characters feel insignificant and small, despite being the hero of the story.

King's Bounty 2 has decent combat but isn't visually striking. There are a few unique vistas and locations, however. The game's graphics are generally good, but there are a few minor issues that can break immersion. These include a noticeable pop-in during loading, character model and clothing texture clipping and poor texture detail, particularly on larger structures.

The UI for exploration and role-playing is good with helpful compass and indications of important commands. Combat UI is less helpful and more difficult to use due to the lack of tooltips or quality of life elements that allow you to quickly read unit information.

Although the audio design and writing are better, they still fall short of expectations. Although the music is not original, the sound effects for spells and units have enough quality that they give combat life and an air of dynamism. King's Bounty 2's most immersive and fun elements are character interactions and voice acting. However, immersion is also affected by awkward moments of dialogue incongruity and minor typos.

King's Bounty 2 performed well from a performance perspective, but there are some obvious shortcomings in optimization and polish. Frame stuttering was a frequent problem in larger cities and when I was exploring or traveling, as well as randomly. Although the game is not very demanding, those who meet the recommended specs should be capable of running it without any problems. However, you should expect occasional frame stuttering that's similar to or worse.

The options menu offers enough customization options for players to play with. Except for the visual jank, there weren't any game-breaking bugs.

This is not the King's Bounty franchise's rebirth. It is sad that even though the developers are concerned about this franchise and have invested a lot of time into it, it seems that their lofty ambitions were limited by design mistakes, lack of experience, low budgets or all three. King's Bounty 2 doesn't do much to lift the series from the shadow of its far more popular spiritual successor, Heroes of Might and Magic.

I get the same feeling with King's Bounty 2 as I did with Stronghold: Warlords, which was also sadly limited by an archaic design philosophy, as well as an outdated game engine. While the former did its best to bring something new, King's Bounty 2 lacks any technological or feature innovation. Any minor world-building ideas are small compared to the mediocre design, tired tropes and general mediocrity. This game is recommended only for diehard fans. Everyone else will not be disappointed.