My Played Video Games Review: King’s Bounty: The Conqueror’s Quest for the Sega Genesis
King's Bounty is a turn-based, strategy fantasy video game created by Jon Van Caneghem, an American video game designer, and published by New World Computing in 1990. It is popularly considered as the forerunner of the Heroes of Might and Magic video game series. King's Bounty itself got "inspired" by the game Chaos: The Battle of Wizards for the ZX Spectrum PC.
A Sega Genesis/Mega Drive port was developed and released in 1991 with many graphical changes. Real-time overworld exploration was also added in the gameplay.
This was the first console strategy game I liked to play. It was not so clunky and menu-driven like others before it.
The Story
Raise your weapons in the name of the king! Traitors dominate the kingdom and the Sceptre of Order is lost. Raise an army of thousands. Lead great legions of various creatures and more to find the scepter and restore the kingdom. Discover 8 powerful items to increase your skills. Cast spells to aid you and destroy your damn enemies. Battle the 25 dangerous fantasy creatures. Use your leadership might to unite rival troops for your army. The playing field starts a different way with each new game.
The Graphics and Sound
Graphics are quite poor. The main game screen is a large green flat with sprites of rural features and medieval buildings that look alike. There are several different sprites from which to gather troops like a hill, crypt, tree and a wagon. The enemy sprites are quite poorly defined although they are differentiated. Strangely, your horse goes east to west while traveling north to south.
The sound is not so bad. No memorable scores here. You will get stuck listening to the same theme over and over on the world map. You do not really notice how obnoxious they are because you get absorbed by the gameplay. The sound effects are minimal, but they get the job done.
The Gameplay
The gameplay is surprisingly very good. You get troops from 2 sources, one from the King, the other from creature lairs on the map. Although the King's Castle troops are unlimited, they tend to be inferior in stats compared to the limited quantity of troops you can find on the map.
The King lost his Sceptre of Order, and it is up to the hero in you to capture the enemy bosses and interrogate them to find out where the Sceptre is, and find out who planned this mess. You can beat the game without defeating ALL the bosses, but it makes you feel like a damn loser.
The Difficulty ranges from a time limit of 900 days to finish your quest, or up to only 200 days. It provides damn good replay value and a fun challenge. The map has random treasure and creature dwellings each time you play. The enemy bosses and powerful items are in different places too.
My Verdict
Overall, King’s Bounty: The Conqueror’s Quest is a fun game. It only lacks in some areas, such as graphics and sound, but that really does not seem to affect the overall playability of it. If you like RPGs or strategy games, I recommend you try it, you will not be disappointed.
Go play this retro gaming hidden gem classic on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive or play it on some emulator for the better save state feature.
Nostalgia ;)
The feeling is mutual, buddy.