King's Bounty: Dark Side (2014)
A turn-based RPG strategy game in the King's Bounty franchise where you join the dark side and fight against the Light.
First released
Aug 14, 2014
Franchises
King's Bounty
Published by
1C Company, Flashpoint AG, Excalibur Publishing Limited
Platforms
PC
Genres
Strategy, Role-Playing
Themes
Fantasy
Rating
PEGI: 12+
Releases
- PC - King's Bounty: Dark Side United States
- PC - King's Bounty: Dark Side United Kingdom
Community reviews
*warning: spoilers* Huge sequel with tons of stuff to do
I am honest, I was going to write a bad review about this game because of many reasons, but as the game progressed, it became better and better. Although it will not look like it in this review, the game is actually fairly good!
King’s Bounty: Dark Side is the final installment of the King’s Bounty series. Its story is fairly simple this time. The Light is taking over the world and exterminating every living creature of the Dark. You need to fight back, build a strong resistance movement, and defeat the Spirit of Light. To do this you need to perform an ungodly number of tasks, making this one of the biggest and longest games in the King’s Bounty series.
The graphics are yet again unchanged or unpolished but still look decent, although, for 2014 it is nothing special anymore.
On the sound department, the developers screwed up. When playing the game on normal speed, everything is fine, but when playing on the high combat speed setting, like most people do, the sounds are randomly disappearing, not working, half working. What the hell? This was one of the reasons I thought this game was not worth it, because you cannot hear your Demon’s axe carving away the flesh of your enemies. It was a huge let down. I heard there were some fixes, but nothing helped. I just had to deal with it or play something else.
The second reason I almost “hated” this game was the slow build up, and the immense, unbelievable, gigantic, absurd, unthinkable amounts of quests and tasks that the devs threw at me right from the beginning. I was completely overwhelmed, confused, and did not know where to start.
And that was the main reason I was about to quit this game. The quests, quest markers and info is so broken, confusing and vague, I had to look up everything online because I just could not figure out what to do. Quest markers remain active after you complete a quest, a person with a quest marker above it’s head does not give you any quests, completed quests remain in your log as if not completed, the “quest complete circle” hovers over incomplete quests and it just drove me nuts. Eventually, at the end of the game, everything fell into place, but it was really hard to keep track of it.
But after reaching level 40, the game suddenly became amazing! I found cool new loot, fought original and well thought of battles, had fun quests and I got the feeling that I was really accomplishing something here and that I was really conquering the world. It made me excited and I played for hours on edge.
Sure, the game had its errand boy quests but hey, easy experience, right?
It is a bummer that there is only one boss fight in this game, but it is not the worst thing ever or something.
This game is the most stable I have played in all the series. Not once did it crash. But everything has its price, in return, the loading times after each battle are ridiculous, it shoots to eighty percent, stalls and loads the rest in slow motion. This was less than a second in the other games.
But overall, King’s Bounty: Dark Side is good. It has a ton of original ideas, concepts, new units, cool locations, and epic battles. Despite its flaws, I think it is still a good game. For the price and what you get for it, I would surely recommend it.
King’s Bounty: Dark Side is the final installment of the King’s Bounty series. Its story is fairly simple this time. The Light is taking over the world and exterminating every living creature of the Dark. You need to fight back, build a strong resistance movement, and defeat the Spirit of Light. To do this you need to perform an ungodly number of tasks, making this one of the biggest and longest games in the King’s Bounty series.
The graphics are yet again unchanged or unpolished but still look decent, although, for 2014 it is nothing special anymore.
On the sound department, the developers screwed up. When playing the game on normal speed, everything is fine, but when playing on the high combat speed setting, like most people do, the sounds are randomly disappearing, not working, half working. What the hell? This was one of the reasons I thought this game was not worth it, because you cannot hear your Demon’s axe carving away the flesh of your enemies. It was a huge let down. I heard there were some fixes, but nothing helped. I just had to deal with it or play something else.
The second reason I almost “hated” this game was the slow build up, and the immense, unbelievable, gigantic, absurd, unthinkable amounts of quests and tasks that the devs threw at me right from the beginning. I was completely overwhelmed, confused, and did not know where to start.
And that was the main reason I was about to quit this game. The quests, quest markers and info is so broken, confusing and vague, I had to look up everything online because I just could not figure out what to do. Quest markers remain active after you complete a quest, a person with a quest marker above it’s head does not give you any quests, completed quests remain in your log as if not completed, the “quest complete circle” hovers over incomplete quests and it just drove me nuts. Eventually, at the end of the game, everything fell into place, but it was really hard to keep track of it.
But after reaching level 40, the game suddenly became amazing! I found cool new loot, fought original and well thought of battles, had fun quests and I got the feeling that I was really accomplishing something here and that I was really conquering the world. It made me excited and I played for hours on edge.
Sure, the game had its errand boy quests but hey, easy experience, right?
It is a bummer that there is only one boss fight in this game, but it is not the worst thing ever or something.
This game is the most stable I have played in all the series. Not once did it crash. But everything has its price, in return, the loading times after each battle are ridiculous, it shoots to eighty percent, stalls and loads the rest in slow motion. This was less than a second in the other games.
But overall, King’s Bounty: Dark Side is good. It has a ton of original ideas, concepts, new units, cool locations, and epic battles. Despite its flaws, I think it is still a good game. For the price and what you get for it, I would surely recommend it.