King's Bounty: Crossworlds Review By HookedGamers
The recent release of King's Bounty: Crossworlds expands the already extensive world of the King's Bounty universe and is the third iteration of the Turn-based Strategy franchise. If you are not familiar with the King's Bounty games, you may know some of its genre peers which include illustrious titles such as Disciples and Heroes of Might & Magic.
The other two cam/paigns are quite similar. In Champion of the Arena, Princess Amelie is replaced with the noble knight Arthur, who is shanghaied by an old acquaintance from the Armored Princess campaign and forced to do battle in an arena. In this campaign, the player can choose to side with one or more guilds that can supply you with units for the fight.
In order to gain their favor, you will become something of a guild hitman, fulfilling requests to take out nefarious individuals in the arena or through the assassin's guild. Arena fights consist of massively strong bosses, big nasty mobs and constant summoning of new units that need to be defeated by your own, non-replenishable army. Unlike the first campaign, battles in this campaign are scaled better and remain challenging throughout. The Champion of the Arena is absolutely brilliant, but unfortunately way too short.
The Defender of the Crown campaign fares a similar fate and is perhaps even shorter. It features a more fleshed out storyline and provides a nice challenge. Here too, combat is scaled quite well and I would have loved more of it but I had barely finished my 'warming-up' exercises when I saw the end credits.
While these two mini-campaigns are fun and well balanced, their length is a missed opportunity. Fans would have been better served if the developers had found a way to incorporate the two smaller campaigns into the bigger overall one.