Info about King's Bounty II:

Official game description:
LORD'S EDITION
==============
LORD'S EDITION NOW INCLUDES:
----------------------------
*   Rod of Deception (weapon)  
*   Frosthammer (weapon)  
*   Staff of Harmony (weapon)  
*   Tyrant's Sword (weapon)  
*   Armor of the Hollow (armor set)  
*   Heroes & Villains Premium Pack (skin pack)  
*   King‘s Watchdogs
DUKE'S EDITION
==============
DUKE'S EDITION INCLUDES:
------------------------
*   Rod of Deception (weapon)  
*   Frosthammer (weapon)  
*   Staff of Harmony (weapon)  
*   Tyrant's Sword (weapon)  
*   Armor of the Hollow (armor set)  
*   Heroes & Villains Premium Pack (skin pack)  
*   King‘s Watchdogs  
*   Digital Artbook  
*   Digital Soundtrack
About the Game
==============
Darkness descends over the world of Nostria. Conspiracies, sabotage, and necromancy are overshadowing the country. But maybe a saviour – the kingdom's last hope – is already here, to fight back and finally restore peace and order in Nostria!  
King’s Bounty II is the long-awaited sequel to the legendary King’s Bounty video games franchise, one of the most iconic representatives of the turn-based RPG genre. Expanding on this legacy with an entirely new epic story, factions, enemies, and new features to forge an open and breaking fantasy world Antara. With the kingdoms in disarray, counties demanding independence, bandits prowl the roads, all the overseas nations have denied the King’s authority over them, and blighted creatures lie in wait for the unwary, new accidental heroes emerge as a last hope.  
They are determined to bring order to the chaos. Play as one of them, recruiting, developing, and commanding your personal army on a non-linear adventure of betrayal, sacrifice, and survival. Fighting for your own future, outsmarting enemy in uniquely turn-based combat, making difficult decisions, and experience the intensity of one of the classic sagas in an exciting new way.
IMMERSIVE AND CHARACTER-DRIVEN EPIC STORY
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Play as one of three main heroes, rescuing and building your personal army in a journey of leadership, survival, and sacrifice. Every decision you make has profound and lasting consequences.
UNIQUE MASSIVE WORLD TO DISCOVER
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The world of Antara is wide open and ripe for exploration. Unearth hidden places and dangerous enemies — Antara is a vast home to a thousand wonders and secrets for players to discover.
CUSTOMIZABLE SQUAD AND EQUIPMENT
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Each army squad has its own set of skills and visual appearance. Build armies of different creatures who will fight with you throughout the majority of your adventure.
TACTICAL DEPTH ON THE BATTLEFIELD
---------------------------------
The environment and landscape matter in King’s Bounty II. Players will encounter diverse terrain types, directly impacting battlefield tactics. Every battle is unique in its own way.

Release date: 24 Aug, 2021

Categories: Turn-based RPG, Turn-based Combat, Tactical Combat, Unit Management, Character Progression, Open-World Exploration, Single-player Story, Equipment Customization


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Engaging quests and puzzles (weight 0.19): The game features engaging quests and puzzles, with multiple solutions and interconnected storylines. Side quests are a major highlight, offering unique stories and character development for the NPCs involved. The game world is full of quests around every corner, and town portals for fast travel.
- Generally enjoyable and acceptable (weight 0.09): These clusters express general enjoyment and acceptability of the game, but lack specific details.  They mention the game being enjoyable initially, decent, and stable, but don't provide concrete feedback on gameplay or features.  Therefore, the importance score is reduced.
- Balanced and appropriate difficulty (weight 0.08): The game offers a balanced challenge, with a learning curve that is appropriate for a strategy game. The difficulty is well-designed, making players carefully consider each piece of equipment and spell. The game can be tough, especially on the hard difficulty setting.
- Improved mechanics and quality-of-life (weight 0.08): The game includes quality of life improvements and well-designed mechanics. The ability to buy back lost units immediately after combat if even one survived is a huge time saver and makes the game more enjoyable. The changes in game mechanics work well.
- Well-executed progression systems (weight 0.03): The hero progression system is well-executed, and the combat progression feels great. The game features a decent equipment set system. The unit leveling system is a great idea, with some units gaining new active skills upon leveling up.

Common complaints:
- Poor balancing and limited units (weight 0.94): The game has poor balancing, with battles ranging from trivial to extremely difficult. There is a limited variety of units, and lower-tier units quickly become obsolete. The game also restricts strategic depth by limiting army size and unit types.
- Clunky controls and movement (weight 0.93): The game suffers from clunky controls and movement, including the character's inability to jump, slow walking speed, and getting stuck on terrain. The horse controls are particularly poor, causing motion sickness and making navigation difficult. The camera system is also awkward and contributes to the overall clunkiness.
- Unfinished and lacking content (weight 0.79): The game feels unfinished and lacks polish, with an abrupt and unsatisfying ending. The developers abandoned support for the game early on, leaving the story incomplete. There is a general lack of content and replayability.
- Tedious exploration and backtracking (weight 0.79): The game world feels empty and uninspired, with repetitive environments and a lack of interactivity. Quests often involve excessive backtracking and fetch tasks, artificially extending playtime. Treasure hunting is tedious, yielding mostly useless junk.
- Outdated and uninspired graphics (weight 0.78): The game's graphics are outdated and unimpressive, resembling games from a decade ago. The transition to 3D is poorly executed and detracts from the overall experience. The art style is bland and lacks visual appeal.
- Clunky and shallow combat (weight 0.73): The combat system is clunky, slow-paced, and lacks depth. Combat maps are small and cluttered, limiting tactical options. Many spells are useless, and the game's balance is an issue.
- Weak story and poor voice-acting (weight 0.23): The game's story is weak, with bland and uninspired writing and dialogue. The voice acting is often poor and lacks emotion, failing to engage the player. Characters are underdeveloped and lack charisma.
- Lacks King's Bounty charm (weight 0.17): The game fails to capture the charm and depth of previous King's Bounty titles. It deviates significantly from the original series, lacking key features and elements that made the franchise popular. The game world feels grim and lacks the fairy-tale feeling of earlier installments.
- Flawed talent and magic systems (weight 0.15): The game's talent and magic systems are flawed and restrictive. The talent system is confusing and lacks flexibility, while the magic system suffers from limited mana and weak spells. Playing as a mage is particularly frustrating due to resource management issues.
- Poor UI and item system (weight 0.15): The game features a poorly designed user interface and item system. The inventory lacks proper sorting, and item descriptions are unclear. The loot system is flawed, with random set drops and an overabundance of useless items.
- Poor economy and grindy quests (weight 0.07): The game's economy is poorly balanced, with high unit costs and insignificant quest rewards. This forces players into a constant grind for money. The quests themselves are repetitive and uninspired.

Gameplay feedback:
- Tactical turn-based battles on hex-grids (weight 0.22): The game features turn-based, hex-grid combat with army customization and character progression, blending RPG and strategy elements. Battles occur on terrain derived from the world map, with varied landscapes that affect tactical decisions. This core gameplay loop involves exploring, questing, and engaging in strategic battles.
- Alignment system impacts choices/army (weight 0.11): The game features a four-way alignment system (Order, Anarchy, Power, Finesse) that influences unit selection, quest outcomes, and skill development. Mixing alignments can lead to morale penalties, encouraging players to specialize their armies and character builds. Choices made during quests affect the hero's ideals, further shaping their path.
- Exploration and questing are emphasized (weight 0.09): The game emphasizes exploration and questing within a large world, often involving fetch and kill quests. Players spend considerable time traversing the map, collecting resources, and interacting with NPCs. This focus on exploration and quest completion can overshadow the tactical combat aspects.
- Hero progression and unit leveling (weight 0.07): Players choose a hero class and develop their character through a skill tree and equipment choices, influencing army size and combat strength via leadership. Units can level up, unlocking new skills and improving stats. Unlocking new map areas reveals merchants with better units and equipment.
- Limited unit stacks and morale (weight 0.06): Unit stacks are limited in size, influenced by the hero's leadership stat. Melee units have control zones, impacting enemy movement. The morale system has been changed, with some players feeling that enemies gain bonus actions more frequently.
- Simplistic combat, limited customization (weight 0.06): The combat system is relatively simplistic and lacks significant innovation. There are only 3 characters to choose from, with customization limited to skill choices, gear, and army composition.
- Third-person perspective for exploration (weight 0.06): The game shifts from a top-down perspective to a third-person view for exploration, a departure from previous titles. While some find this change interesting, others feel it makes exploration more tedious. The core gameplay remains similar to King's Bounty, but with this altered perspective.
- Mana system is not restrictive (weight 0.05): The game uses a mana system for spellcasting, requiring players to find mana orbs or stones. While mana is a finite resource, reviews suggest it's abundant enough that players rarely need to worry about running out. This diminishes the strategic importance of mana management.
- Shorter battles, familiar gameplay (weight 0.04): Battles are shorter compared to previous games, and the gameplay loop is similar to earlier entries in the series. Some reviewers find the game slower-paced overall. The game requires changing the army, which eliminates the staleness of past versions.
- Generic and unengaging story (weight 0.04): The story is described as generic and unengaging, with repetitive dialogue and pointless open-world elements. Choices and factions lack significant impact on the narrative. Music and voice acting are considered average, and character progression is dull.
- Easy and uninspired puzzles (weight 0.03): The game includes puzzles, but they are often too easy and feel like filler content. The game offers map freedom, side missions, secrets, and puzzles.
- Gold is essential for progression (weight 0.02): Gold is a crucial resource for healing units, acquiring new troops, and obtaining gear. Effective gold management is essential for progression.
- Strategic depth increases mid-game (weight 0.02): Strategic customization increases in the mid-game with more equipment and magic options. Battles become more interesting later in the game, requiring more strategic thinking. Magic becomes overpowered after the first third of the game if spells are learned correctly.
- Difficulty tapers off mid-game (weight 0.02): Players can use a throwaway army if a fight is too difficult. The game retains its difficulty until the player assembles a pack of 4-5 tier troops. Combat doesn't start immediately, allowing for pre-battle adjustments.

Performance notes:
- Technical issues and poor optimization (weight 0.14): Many players report significant technical issues, including outdated graphics, optimization problems leading to frame rate drops and freezes, and various bugs that cause crashes, characters getting stuck, and other disruptions. Some reviewers noted the graphics resemble those of games from a decade ago, while others experienced frequent crashes and the need to reload.
- Inconsistent frame rates (weight 0.02): Several users have reported experiencing frame rate slowdowns in specific areas of the map without any apparent cause. One user also reported a lighting bug that caused intense flickering, which they temporarily resolved by changing the screen resolution.
- Level design and physics issues (weight 0.01): The game world suffers from level design issues, including corridor-like maps, buggy environments, and invisible walls, reminiscent of older games. Additionally, the hero character may levitate or get stuck on small obstacles, further detracting from the experience.
- 60 FPS cap and high specs (weight 0.01): The game's frame rate is capped at 60 FPS, regardless of the player's hardware capabilities. Additionally, the game has high computer specification requirements, even for modern hardware.
- Unresponsive NPCs (weight 0.01): NPCs in the game exhibit limited behavior, often standing blankly or repeating dialogue. This can detract from the overall immersion and believability of the game world.
- Pauses between turns (weight 0.01): Players have reported experiencing strange pauses of 1-3 seconds between turns during battles. This can disrupt the flow of combat and make the game feel less responsive.
- UI issues at high resolution (weight 0.01): In 3840 X 1600 resolution text mixes with titles and some options are out of screen. This makes it difficult for players to read and navigate the game's menus and options.
- Restrictive key binding options (weight 0.01): Players find the game's options for key bindings to be restrictive. This limits the ability to customize the control scheme to individual preferences, potentially impacting gameplay comfort and efficiency.
- Unremarkable audio (weight 0.01): The music and sound design in the game are considered unremarkable. This suggests that the audio elements do not significantly enhance or detract from the overall gaming experience.

Recommendations:
- Purchase only on deep sale (weight 0.6): Many reviewers suggest only buying the game on sale due to its flaws, high price relative to content, or because it feels incomplete. Some even recommend waiting for a significant discount (50% to 90% off) or purchasing older titles instead. A few reviewers explicitly state the game is not worth full price or even the sale price in some cases.
- Fails King's Bounty legacy (weight 0.43): A recurring sentiment is that the game fails to capture the essence of the original King's Bounty titles. Many reviewers advise approaching it as a separate entity or recommend playing older games instead, as this installment lacks the soul and personal touch of its predecessors.
- Good for genre fans (weight 0.4): Some reviewers recommend the game to fans of the genre or those seeking a light strategy experience. However, newcomers may find it difficult, and there are better alternatives available for those new to tactical combat games.
- Enjoyable, but not exceptional (weight 0.38): Despite mixed feelings, some reviewers found the game enjoyable and recommend it, giving it scores between 6/10 and 8.5/10. They express hope for future installments or expansions to address criticisms and improve the experience.
- 3D perspective diminishes strengths (weight 0.3): The shift to a 3D shoulder-view perspective and other new changes introduce flaws that diminish the strengths of the original games, particularly for fans of strategy RPGs.
- RPG movement SRPG combat good (weight 0.29): The idea of combining RPG movement with SRPG combat is seen as a positive.
- Strongly disappointing experience (weight 0.24): Several reviewers express strong disappointment, calling the game a failure, a waste of money, or not enjoyable. Some feel the developers didn't care about the game, leading to a generic and incomplete experience. These reviews often lack specific details, suggesting a possible review bombing.
- Tweak settings for better experience (weight 0.1): Some reviewers suggest increasing movement speed in settings to alleviate issues. One reviewer cautions players sensitive to motion sickness.
- Choose character carefully (weight 0.01): It's recommended to research and choose a character based on play style preference before starting, as it's not possible to fully upgrade the magic skill tree if a strength-based character is chosen.

Other player notes:
- Differs from classic King's Bounty (weight 0.03): The game is a sequel that draws inspiration from Heroes of Might and Magic, but some reviewers were initially disappointed that it doesn't fully capture the essence of the classic King's Bounty formula. The game's atmosphere is more akin to "The Witcher" than the original King's Bounty.
- Shift to 3D graphics (weight 0.03): The game transitioned to 3D graphics, offering a more modern look and a third-person perspective, although the graphics are only considered acceptable. This is a significant departure from the original's top-down or isometric view.
- Premature release feeling (weight 0.02): The game feels like it was released prematurely without proper testing. This suggests potential bugs, balance issues, or missing features.
- Skill respecs available (weight 0.01): The game allows players to respec their skill points. The first respec is free, but subsequent respecs cost a significant amount of in-game gold.
- Hopes for sequel/DLC (weight 0.01): Reviewers express hope for a sequel or DLC to address the game's shortcomings, with some feeling the game is like a beta version. They urge developers to continue the story and improve upon existing features.
- Unrewarding treasure caches/lore (weight 0.01): Treasure caches and lore books are unrewarding. Scrolls and books scattered throughout the map don't add to the story, making them feel like pointless collectibles.
- Full voice acting included (weight 0.01): The game features full voice acting and cutscenes, a significant upgrade from its predecessor's text-based presentation. However, some question whether these features were the best use of resources for a strategy game.
- Abandoned by developers (weight 0.01): The game was abandoned by its developers. This may impact future support, updates, and bug fixes.
- Steam version lacks DLC (weight 0.01): The Steam version lacks the Day Zero DLC, which is available in the GOG version. This makes the GOG version a better deal at a similar price.
- Hold 'H' to heal troops (weight 0.01): Holding the 'H' button after combat heals troops, which is essential to avoid running out of money and mana. This mechanic is crucial for resource management.
- Limited and fragile soldiers (weight 0.01): Soldiers are limited, non-restocking, expensive, and fragile. This creates a challenging resource management aspect to the game.

Emotions:
No emotions}