In any case, that Russian company appears to have had something to do with the weirdly excellent Space Rangers 2, and that comes as no big surprise because King's Bounty is brilliant. It's a "remake" of an (admittedly, extremely good) 1991 game that was the precursor to the Heroes of Might and Magic series. King's Bounty has absolutely no right whatsoever to be good. It's like a game based on a fantasy convention filled with cosplayers, and this convention is either taking place in SeaWorld, or a marine biologist got the date for his seminar wrong and is wandering around and looking puzzled.
Then I remembered that calling this game unoriginal is in fact a really silly thing to do, so I stomped all over the fortress with my army of dragonflies and pirates and sapient, thorn-shooting plants.Īnd loincloth-wearing barbarians and cyclopes and demons and dragons and dwarves and elves and ents and humans and inquisitors and ogres and orcs and paladins and polar bears and giant rock monsters and skeletons and unicorns and vampires and werewolf-elves and wizards and wolves and zombies and a big goddamn turtle, and that doesn't even come close to the sheer amount of different creatures. So when I spotted an orc fortress in King's Bounty: The Legend, and they acted like that, I nearly cried. Some games have done clever things with orcs and made them much more interesting. Generally speaking, when generic orcs show up - ones that don't have anything clever done with them, ones who are just muscular green thickies who shout things like, "Me gronk! Me stab human now!" - I let out a groan. If I've learned anything from playing games, it is that orcs are really boring.