King’s Bounty: The Legend is one of those games where at first glance it seems to be one of the funnest games ever made. Essentially it is a real-time overhead RPG with turn-based strategy style combat. The avatar you control doesn’t engage in combat directly, instead he has armies which he leads into battle. It’s actually a very fun combination of game play, and gamers familiar with the Heroes of Might and Magic series will feel right at home.
Basically, you go out into the world, you perform quests, you fight battles, and, hopefully, eventually you’ll get somewhere. The world is beautiful, it has a colorful and cartoonish look, and equally silly, yet fun, characters to interact with. It’s a hard game to put down. The first time you play, you’ll soon realize that eight hours have just passed you by. Sadly, however, you’ll soon discover the major problems with this game.
The problem is that THIS GAME IS IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT CHEATING. Okay, maybe it’s not impossible, but I personally put almost 22 hours into this game when I finally got to a point where I had to scour the landscape looking for battles that I could actually win. Most of the time I had to fight half a battle, run away, restock my army, then finish the battle. That was the worst. almost as bad as that, was fighting a battle, winning, then having to restock my army anyway. This involved a lot of running back and forth, and it was very tedious.
Finally, I was fed up, I just wanted to finish the game. I looked up the cheat codes, and it turns out that a link to the cheats are posted on the [[link:http://www.kings-bounty.com/eng/legend game’s homepage]]. The website says, “During the game you can use different cheat codes, which will make the game easier and gives you the possibility to [win].” They are basically saying you have to cheat to win. The game is too hard. It just isn’t well balanced, and it needed a lot more play-testing.
I’m sure some will argue that it is possible to win this game, and I acknowledge, that sure, it may be possible. If you want to inch your way through it, and spend over 100 hours in it. Frankly, that is too long. Being that this is, for the most part, an RPG, it is in my opinion that you should be able to play through the main quest, doing only a minimum amount of side quests, and finish this game. You can’t do that. You can’t even come close to doing that. With cheating it took almost another ten hours to finish this game. That was ridiculous.
It’s really not that bad a game, and I’m sorry to say, that as fun and amazing as this game appears at first, I cannot recommend it. It just doesn’t have the polish it needs. It doesn’t have the balance that it needs. I hate relying on cheats to win games, but honestly, without them, I was just going to give up on this game anyway.