A new game from the developers of the once famous Pocket Heroes. This time it is not just a high-quality clone of 'Heroes' for mobile platforms, but their fancy mixture with the game-progenitor – the famous King's Bounty …
First start
What do you do after you turn on a new game for the first time? I personally go into the settings right there and then. It doesn't make much sense in mobile games, but habit is a scary thing. So in Royal Bounty HD I immediately opened the settings menu and was very happy to find the 'telephone interface' item there. And in vain – I don't know who made it and why, but in terms of its appearance and convenience, it is very much inferior to its standard version. Maybe on phones with a smaller display diagonal this option will be appropriate, but on my device it looked frankly strange.
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Otherwise, the first impression of the game is a complete delight. First of all, because of the same pixel graphics – painfully familiar figures of heroes and different creatures, carefully traced objects of the global map and the familiar screen of a tactical battle … The game is generally very attentive to trifles, lovers of old 'Heroes' will more than once brush away a stingy tear of emotion looking at the painfully familiar cursor in the form of a rearing horse or at the sight of an offer to distribute the found gold to peasants in order to gain more experience. Searching for artifacts, a book of spells, hiring creatures – everything is in its usual place. Perhaps, only the global-strategic part of the “Heroes” lovers will upset – this is mainly a journey around the map, quests and tactical battles, and not at all the management of castles and a scrupulous calculation of a heap of types of resources. But the fans of King's Bounty (of which the 'heroic' series has just grown up) will feel like a fish in water.
At the same time, the interface of the game cannot be called a copy of the second 'Heroes' with all the desire, there are enough elements from the later games in the series. I must say that Royal Bounty HD is only beneficial – and the spirit of the original is preserved, and it is convenient to play.
The technical side
From a technical point of view, I also have no complaints about the game. No crashes, freezes, bugs and other troubles. Everything works smoothly, it does not take very long to load. Although they write anything in the reviews.
A map that is too small for a phone screen can always be zoomed in, and this applies to both adventure and tactical modes.
For the most part, there is only one minus – the game opens from the minimized state for a very long time, and a couple of times it just hung up on me, not fully loaded. Maybe this is a feature of my device, I don't know.
Game process
Questions for the game begin to arise later, when you realize that the wrapper does not really match the content. And it's not even that the genre of the game is closer to King's Bounty than to Heroes of Might and Magic. And not even in the unusually linear missions and available donation. You just have to take a closer look at the game, and all the castles in the air drawn by a naughty imagination collapse like a house of cards.
On the famous “heroic” series, many small studios managed to warm their hands, all sorts of “browsers” and f2p toys over the years a whole carriage has come out. Some projects turned out to be more or less successful, some were not good at all, but the goal was almost always the same – to make more money from gullible fans. So, to say something like that about the creators of Royal Bounty HD, I just can't turn my tongue. It can be seen that the game was made with love and really tried to resurrect the series that died under the torture of Ubisoft. And the work they did really titanic, how much effort and money was spent on creating a game at a small studio, it's scary to even guess. I'm not even talking about the support of different platforms – as far as I know, for the same Android the game had to be redone almost from scratch. But all these efforts had practically no effect on the final result.
If we forget about the pixel graphics and familiar unit names, it becomes clear that we are faced with a typical mobile game. Frankly weak artificial intelligence, simplified mechanics and lack of proper balance do not allow Royal Bounty to be called a quality turn-based strategy. A banal plot, primitive quests and often frankly delusional dialogues do not allow her to pretend to be an interesting adventure. They obviously saved money on the screenwriter, and it seems that the level design was entrusted to the same programmers. Yes, you can increase the level of difficulty, you can deliberately complicate your life by coming up with some additional conditions, you can replay the same battle dozens of times trying to achieve an ideal result. You can walk the map up and down in search of all the secrets. But the gameplay will not become more interesting from this and will not grow to the level of classic 'Heroes'.
On the one hand, I even somewhere admire the tenacity of the developers who have done everything possible and impossible to make their dream of a 'new old game' a reality. But at the same time, I'm not at all sure that it was really worth doing. At least this way.
Outcome
To revive the old idea of persistence alone is not enough, it also needs talent. And even not so much programmers and artists as game designers. Otherwise, instead of a lively and vivid game, the result will be a kind of cheerful zombie with brightly painted lips and false eyelashes.
You can't just borrow the plot and the main characters from Tolstoy, and then re-write 'that very' War and Peace, but in your own way. Even if you honestly kill years for this and try to copy the original style in everything. Either it will be a completely different book, which will be evaluated without regard to the original, or a nondescript and it is not clear why written copy, amateur 'fanfic'.
Despite the almost 'correct' game genre and 'the same' mechanics, for me Royal Bounty has become something like Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes . It seems that there is a global map, and tactically there are battles, and the pictures of the units are familiar … but only it has nothing to do with those 'Heroes'.
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Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes |
If you are tormented by nostalgia, it is better to install the good old 'Heroes' on your PC and spend a couple of evenings behind them. Or replace them with the same 'King's Bounty. The Legend of the Knight 'is a great example of how to revive forgotten episodes. Royal Bounty HD will forever remain an ugly duckling, no 'warm lamp graphics', familiar unit and spell names, and even encouraging words from New World Computing employees will not be able to disguise the simple fact that this game is noticeably lower class.
