For the Love of...King's Bounty

Years ago, I was at the computer section of a Yorkshire town market and came across a CD of Mega Drive games. In my youthful naiveté, I didn't realise the legality of emulation and ROMs, but that five pounds gave me hours of entertainment. Amongst the myriad of classics such as Golden Axe, Sonic and Alex Kidd, there was one game that stood out: King's Bounty. The more eagle-eyed readers of the site may remember my review of a game called King's Bounty: The Legend. As it happens, it was a remake of this game.

The premise of King's Bounty was fairly simple: the player is given a set number of days to retrieve the Sceptre of Order before King Maximus dies, with the number of days given decreasing as the difficulty increased. The evil dragon Arech Dragonbreath, original names were a next-gen invention, has divided the only map of the sceptre's location into 25 pieces and has hidden them throughout the four continents.

The player must choose one of four heroes and recover the sceptre. What struck me most at the time was that, like most classics, King's Bounty was simple to learn but difficult to master. The range of options available to the player to obtain the sceptre were hugely varied. If you wanted to play as a treasure hunter then you hired a boat, ransacked chests to find the maps to the different continents and hunted down the pieces of map which were not held by enemies. Provided your knowledge of the game was sufficient, it was perfectly possible to find the sceptre having only revealed a few pieces of the map.

If you wanted to try a more combat-oriented route then you had to carefully balance your income each week with the cost of hiring troops. Most chests gave the player the option to either take the contained cash or to distribute it amongst the troops to raise their morale. For every increase to morale, you could hire more troops who were essential in defeating the game's later villains. As a result, you had to keep a close eye on your troops. If you ran out of money, they left your army without so much as a refund.

Flying in the face of the more arcade experiences previously offered by the Mega Drive, it was surprising that King's Bounty allowed you to get yourself into situations which had no easy solution. If you kept increasing your troops' morale but didn't raise your leadership, your troops would revolt, turning on you mid-battle. Ghosts in particular would absorb fallen foes, becoming far too powerful to control and leaving an invincible army under the control of your enemy.

To control a large army, you needed to pick up items that increased your stats and regularly grab money. Aside from the chests, which could grant one time bonuses, increase your weekly pay from the king or grant you powerful magic spells, you could also take out contracts on the most wanted criminals in the game world. The rewards upon collection were hefty bounties and another pieces of the map. In addition, for every few villains captured, the king would promote you, increasing your leadership substantially and unlocking the next tier of units at the castle.

Spywork and strategy were also viable ways to succeed. Villains resided in castles which were dotted around the map but, as the location of each villain changed every game, players had to do some preparation. Asking at towns could offer some clues to the castles' inhabitants and, failing that, knocking on their door always worked a treat. To assault the castles, you needed not only the catapult, but also a varied force, and non-kingdom troops could be encountered at recruitment points or weaker wandering armies. Each troop type had an alignment, and if you mixed different alignments party morale would decrease and troops would desert. Additionally, if your party contained only flying troops you could mount your dragon and fly!

Magic also played a big part of the experience, with each class you chose directly impacting your prowess. The sorceress had the most skill but fewest troops. Her powerful magic spells, which could turn the tide in battle or help you travel when time was trickling away, more than made up for her lack of troop numbers though.

Although a port of an earlier PC game its legacy continued with Heroes of Might and Magic, which helped to define the genre and even a board game, though I've never had the pleasure of playing it. The graphics may have become infinitely more advanced, but most of the gameplay is still present in Heroes of Might and Magic V, a testament to the quality of creator Jon Van Caneghem's vision. Thank God the sound has evolved though, the tinny travel music has been stuck in my head since the early 90s and, much like the franchise, shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon.