The heart of King's Bounty is the incredibly deep and rich turn-based combat system. The player plays the game as a lone hero in a classic (and fairly generic) save-the-kingdom storyline but battles aren't fought by the hero personally. Instead they're fought by stacks of creatures recruited from the surrounding landscape that move across a hexagonal tile map to clash with stacks of enemy creatures. Each type of creature has certain powers and/or special abilities along with a plethora of other strengths and weaknesses that determine the outcome of every battle. The winner is whoever still has any creatures standing after the fighting's done.
There are two aspects to this combat system that really make the game work. The first is the sheer quality of what Katauri has put together. The player has dozens and dozens of different types of creatures to choose from, ranging from fantasy standards like orcs and elves to the slightly more avant-garde like poison-spitting sentient plants. The fact that slapping all these creatures into one fantasy world makes the game feel more like the dealer's room at Comic-Con than an actual ecosystem is beside the point. All these creatures and the hero spells and magical artifacts that support them offer a ton of strategic variables to consider without making the whole thing feel cumbersome and difficult to manage. The numbers are there if the player really wants them, but it's much easier to remember that fire arrows from archers do more damage to cold-related creatures.
The second thing that makes the game work might actually be more important -- the faith that Katauri Interactive had in the basic gameplay mechanics of the original King's Bounty. One of the consistent criticisms leveled at a game like Mirror's Edge or the earlier versions of Prince of Persia was that the combat felt like an afterthought. To me, that's a development team that doesn't trust its core mechanic to carry the day and feels like it has to put in some extraneous element as a "hook." While videogames can be complicated (and King's Bounty is not a simple game), they should be built around a simple concept that's fun on its own. Anything else should somehow support the game's basic mechanic. King's Bounty has a veneer of RPG elements but it doesn't take too many hours of play to realize that this is no more an RPG than Call of Duty 4. The RPG stats are there to support the main gameplay element -- fighting the turn-based strategic battles.
Videogames have been around long enough to finally have a history. While we're all in favor of looking forward and pushing for innovation, there are lots of great gaming franchises languishing in the IP vaults of some really big companies (memo to Blizzard/Activision: Free Infocom!). The gamers of today deserve to have some of the great gaming experiences that older gamers remember so fondly, and older gamers deserve to see some these classics get remade with the technological updates made possible by today's hardware. Until that happy day arrives, though, we have Katauri Interactive and King's Bounty. Katauri brought back a classic and updated it in ways that would make the folks at New World Computing proud, which is why it's in the running for some of our Game of the Year awards.
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