Picked up the Platinum edition off steam recently and I am most pleasantly surprised by how good King's Bounty is: I never played the original (or HoMM for that matter, BG/NWN person myself) and completely missed this when it came out. Hard to put a finger on what makes it so good, but the beautiful fairytale style art work, not taking itself too seriously plot-wise, and a wickedly vicious combat system that coupled with resource scarcity delivers serious punishment for mistakes and unwise decisions and encourages a non-linear approach to exploration seem to have a lot to do with it.
I particularly like the UI design which I think is an object lesson in how to make an attractive but functional and simple game interface - little touches like the button that expands the inventory over the army unit list in the hero screen tells me someone put a lot of thought and design skill into crafting it - should get a gold star IMO.
There are only thing I have a slight problem with (and let's face it
every game has something not everyone likes) is having to run round all the time getting reinforcements for the units I want which i find tedious. Part of this is that I tend to want certain units I think are effective or I have learned to fight well rather than take advantage of locally available alternatives (which I should probably do more of) BUT.....
......resource limitations, both in unit numbers available and gold, make for a big disincentive to take on strong opposition in exiting seat-of-the-pants battles. Rather it seems to pay hand over fist to seek out and methodically grind through as much equal or slightly weaker opposition as possible to hoover up as much XP, gold and leadership as possible until those stronger opponents themselves become cheap, routine and profitable XP fodder.
Anyone got any advice on how to get round this, please let me have it