There is a reason something like Grand Theft Auto or Skyrim takes several years and thousands of developers to be sufficiently developed. Announced back in 2019, King’s Bounty 2 is a full-blown sequel to the 1990 game King’s Bounty; A turn-based fantasy game that looks (in retrospect) like a child created it and put it on Steam. There have been a handful of sequels through the years, predominantly working as spin-offs with prettier graphics. This was meant to be the big one, the proper sequel after 13-years of pretenders to the court jester’s crown.

I wouldn’t blame you if you were slightly disappointed, at least in part. The nicest thing I can say, though done through gritted teeth, is that there was at least an attempt to overload you with a catalog of fantasy names and lore. It is just a shame that it all is built around one of three characters: Aivar, a warrior and basic white guy, Katharine, a white woman doing her best cosplay of Yennefer of Vengerberg, and Elisa, another white woman. However, Elisa is a normal person enprisoned for whatever Bethesda arrests you for at the start of every Elder Scrolls game. It appears like no one looked at the good RPGs and noticed why anyone appreciates them.

I get it. Some of you may be side-eying my previously stated disdain for high-fantasy, RPGs, and turn-based combat, which is valid. However, for each of those, I enjoy games that fall within those categories; The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt takes up two of those, and I believe I’ve noted my enjoyment of Wargroove, Advance Wars, X-Com, Mutant Year Zero, Madden NFL 22, and others before. I’m not biased against the concept from the get-go, but the voice acting opens the game with an amateur high-school drama class. Additionally, the editing of scenes equally neglected to cut pauses in, and the end of lines would stop like The Sopranos, with the writing not fitting the tone. I knew from that point what to expect.

The core idea sits perfectly fine, until you have people in the pre-medieval prison of a snowy fort ending their sentences with “you know.” I’m all for someone getting their middle-fantasy on before Noctis and boob-a-rella start melting Final Fantasy and Top Gear together, but at least stick with the theme. On one hand, it attempts to be quite serious and play into the noble straight-faced nonsense with tons of fantasy names. Then out of nowhere, I’m talking to a skeleton that’s trapped at the top of a tower and dying. If I opened a portal and began talking with a magical skeleton named Berengarius that was coughing (somehow) his last breaths (again, I’m confused), my first words would not be, “Ok, I’ll do your little puzzle.“

The gameplay isn’t the pinnacle of excellence either. Tool-tip after tool-tip overlaps every other bit of UI in and out of menus like I was playing Crusader Kings 3 again. The open-ish 3D world is about as well designed as a corridor made of cardboard boxes with the scenery painted on it, which isn’t capturing the creativity of my mind. It is reminding the imagination that Skyrim might have had massive spiders, but it was at least sprawling and interesting. The Witcher 3 is a treasure trove of great stories intertwined with combat-led gameplay. This brings me to the meat of this turn-based tactics fantasy pork sandwich: It has been replaced with plants.

The argument could be made that some games feed you too much information at any given time. Sometimes they fill the screen with health bars, weapon equipment wheels, and spell casting toolbars that once you advance beyond the beginning, start resembling your keyboard. I’d argue that in exploration that would be the case, where health doesn’t matter as you can’t be attacked. Things tell me half my current quest, more tool-tips, every button I can use, and everything else that just feels like it is cluttering up the screen. In combat, everything disappears so you can get tool-tips from hovering over units. That’s fine when you want to know how much health a unit has left, but it ends up useless. You’re being fed numbers you don’t understand in different tool-tips.

This may sound backward from a man who looks at JRPGs and western RPGS with contempt when I see a UI cluttered with several unit’s health bars along the bottom of the screen. However, I’d much rather know how far up the river I am before I think about quitting and reloading. You see, death should be calculated on a specific factor in all games: is it annoying to get back to the point you were before the death? If yes, redesign your system or just call it Souls-like. Lunatics will tell you how it isn’t Dark Souls, but at least someone will like it. Otherwise, I’m probably not going to have fun with your game and I’ll say it is just trying to do the same as self-flagellation.

I wondered for the longest time why was I getting so much gold before, after, and between fights, then all my units died in battle. I went into this battle with full units, filled all the available slots, and came out the other end wanting to bang my head on a wall. The game loaded me outside the battle and in front of a unit vendor that wasn’t there five minutes ago. Said vendor charged me all my money and gave me half the amount of units I had before. That’s not up the river, that is sailing right off the edge of Niagara Falls in a barrel.

When each unit can only do one attack and not a collection, I’m bored by how simple the entire affair happens to be, or I’m fed up with the level it is knocking me about, then the turn-based combat gameplay in this turn-based tactics RPG isn’t exciting me to keep going. The story and roleplaying isn’t exciting me, and neither is the gameplay: Is there anything that does? Morbid curiosity mostly, watching the little court jester march out in front of the king (general consuming public) and listening to the reaction as Roland the Farter does his act once again in a barrel.

The gusto to which King’s Bounty 2 brings the fantasy thick and fast at you without apologizing is admirable, but the trouble is not being engaged by it. Maybe it is the 4th-century fantasy setting filled with broad American accents from voice actors that were given the chance to read each line once. At least, that’s the only rationalization I could think of for such a poor quality of acting. Equally, it could be the endeavor to ground the world in established terms and commonplace actions to the characters. However, as a player, not understanding this gives me the feeling that I’m left in the dark.

It is as if someone slapped the writer with the lore book of Anthem and were told to make that fantasy, which just leaves you with the magic and short-angry versions of men shouting about Sentinels, Javelins, Cataclysms, and everything else. As an RPG it is nothing to write home about, with less than meat on the bone than dead deer surrounded by wild dogs. As a turn-based tactics game, it is what you’d have expected several years ago from a game you got in cereal. It is uninspired, monotonous, and never feels like I know the trick to any of it. Ultimately it creates a weird mess of a game that I’m sure fans could grit their teeth at and play, but it would be another argument if they even enjoyed it.

An Xbox One copy of King’s Bounty 2 was provided by 1C Entertainment for the purposes of this review.

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King's Bounty 2

$49.99

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• At least there was an attempt to do lore.

Cons

• Editing of scenes.
• Graphically dated, back to the start of this generation.
• Voice Acting that is done by high-school amateur dramatics class.
• Every tool-tip, every single one!