King's Bounty: Warriors of the North

The Good
Just when you thought you saw it all, yet comes another standalone add-on for King's Bounty: The Legend with a few more innovations to keep it fresh and original. Its strongest point is probably without a doubt the scrip. Yes, there's tons of it, yes, there's more quests than you can wish for, and yes, it'll make you burst into tears from time to time, not because it's so silly and dumb, but because it's creatively dumb. Your character, Olaf, is a strong handsome bloke who can cut any enemy in half, but whose intelligence is not that high. Nevertheless, he's heroic, a true warrior, and sticks to his beliefs and code of conduct. Very often you will find yourself answering questions in such a silly manner which will just emphasize your character's stupidity, but it was so masterfully done that you'll never get enough of it. Dialogue writing here tops the previous few installments.

We had dragon companion in Armored Princess and something else in The Legend, and here you have Valkyries as well as your own special attacks. It all works well and it does feel original, even though it's the same sort of thing reinvented and implemented in another way. New obvious armies are vikings, and Viking lands, and there's quite a bit of detail spent there, as well as on new NPCs, quests, map areas and overall feel we liked with the past games in the series.

This game is long. Too long to even feel like an add-on. It is longer than The Legend and Armored Princess combined, and it feels much bigger. Often have I thought I have reached the end, only to question why half of the maps are still left uncovered... which of course, should have been my pointer that I wasn't even playing the second half of the game. The story too is much more detailed and seems more interesting than that of Bill and Amelie from previous two games. Plenty of new stuff to keep you interested, and fighting undead as the main enemy force is certainly more fun than always fighting the demons.

The Bad
There's a log of text in this game, and while it may be fun if you read through it, it can halt you for a long time between battles which are core of the fun and probably the thing you want to engage in next. For a game like this it is hard to accept that there is no voice-acting whatsoever, even during some key scenes, but that is probably because this game doesn't have any particular key scene nor uses cutscenes to emphasize events. While all this can be accepted, an insurmountable amount of typos and bad grammar make reading through gazillion of onscreen texts make it that less enjoyable. More to the fact that certain races like orcs talk bad on purpose, and when you include unwanted typos and bad grammar into it, it just goes over the top. Many sentences doesn't make sense whatsoever, although for anyone who understands English, it isn't hard to understand what it should say. Game with strong emphasis and huge amount of text should pay a proper translator to make sure English version makes sense. This game doesn't feel professional at all in that area, and feels like developer team just took a whack at it and translated it themselves.

With great many NPCs with weird names, following quests may feel hard because quests don't always tell you where you need to go, just who to speak to, and after talking to 100 NPCs with names such as Ygdr Aflk or whatever the name is, even if you can say "oh hey, that sounds like a name of an Orc, or maybe it's a Dwarf... naah, it's a strong Viking name", the facts that races and individual characters are scattered around islands can make it hard to pinpont the location of where you should go and you may just skip on that quest altogether.

Valkyries join very late in the game, one after another, and you can't upgrade their skills as you please, but at random on your each level up. As such, they are very weak at first, and by the time you upgrade them you are already too strong and so are your enemies and Valkyrie's upgraded destructive powers just aren't so destructive anymore. So two problems here, first, you cannot choose what to upgrade next, even if you have a Valkyrie, her power may not be presented to you to upgrade on your level up, and second, it all happens too late to make it worthwhile, especially since they have limit as to how far you can upgrade them.

In previous two games you could have your companion and spouse which made it rather nice as you could share stories, engage in conversation, and feel you're not alone on your quest. Here, you have Valkyries, but there is no romance between you. Sure, they may get to admire you by the end of the game, but you cannot woo anyone here, even though some female characters may be attracted to you and show their affection.

The Bottom Line
What we got with Armored Princess and then some. Twice as long, much more interesting, no silly "talking to the giant turtle" ending, original bosses (except the ever-present giant spider boss), new unit types (there are no lizards this time, though), new lands to explore, lots of funny dialogues (if you can get past the typos and bad grammar), many many many quests, both new and old NPCs, and extended BGM soundtrack. Honestly, I wasn't expecting this game to provide so much because, well, I didn't think adding vikings can have such a great impact and provide so much new and interesting content like it did. While it feels like an add-on, it has enough new stuff to treat it as a sequel. Buggy, sure, but great nonetheless.