Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Finding myself, for the first time in at least two years, with a weekend in which I didn’t have an insane amount of work to do, I idly returned to crazed Russian RPG-strategy delight King’s Bounty, which is continuing to entertain me more than any game this year outside of World of Goo. Without quite realising it, I managed to clock up something like 14 hours of play over the weekend alone, which I feel awful about – especially as that’s on top of the 25 or so I put into the game a couple of weeks back. I haven’t been this bad with a game since the height of my terrible WoW addiction a few years ago.
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So I gazed up at the mountain of games about guns due this Autumn, and I sighed a little. Did I burn myself out on all those FPSes last year? Are, heaven forfend, my baser instincts now somehow in check? I will play Far Cry 2 and Dead Space and Fallout 3, but right now they’re not what appeal. I made it about 15 minutes into Crysis Warhead before the oh-this-again tedium hit, and I blame myself more than I do the game for that. I wanted something a little different, something I could sink into on more than a purely visceral level, but I didn’t know what.

Turns out it was King’s Bounty: The Legend, the RPG-strategy remake/sequel from some of the good (mad) folks behind Space Rangers 2. I’m not going to review it or even describe it here. Instead, I’m going to tell two stories that aptly demonstrate the insanity-ingenuity of the thing.
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As we previously reported, there’s a demo out for King’s Bounty: The Legend. But what we haven’t reported yet is there’s an updated demo available which features improved text and translation, video card support and – perhaps more appealingly – new character classes of Demons, Orcs and Cyclops. We haven’t reported it yet, but that’s what we’re doing now. RPS Satanist Ed Says: Hurrah for Demons!

Space Rangers 2 folks Katauri Interactive are releasing their new game, King’s Bounty: The Legend, in the US soon (possibly in the UK, but nowt confirmed) and the English demo is out already. Get it here, at a muscular 687mb.

It’s a shiny-looking Heroes of Might & Magic type fantasy RPG, albeit modernised and polished up in a rather Blizzardian fashion. The Russian press gave it a big thumbs up. Let me know what you think, I’ll be really interested to hear everyone’s impressions of this one.

Yesterday we were being a little conspiracy-ist theory about what 1C: Ino-Co were working on alongside Majesty. We suddenly realised we may have been missing something – 1C are publishing the forthcoming King’s Bounty: The Legend, a reboot of the proto-Heroes of Might and Magic game. Except it’s not it – the developers aren’t 1C: Ino-Co, but rather Katauri Interactive, which is basically what The Space Rangers 2 team did next. And, to be honest, coming from the Space Rangers 2 team is I need to get a bit excited about something – but that it’s just received the press award from the recent Russian KRI show is another promising sign.
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