King's Bounty: Crossworlds short review

So, after the disappointing Disciples game (review), I still had that itch to play a Heroes of Might and Magic style game and I realised, wait, what about the King's Bounty series? The original was the actual forerunner for the entire genre back in 1990. I kept putting off playing the franchise for years, not sure why really, but I finally finished Crossworlds.

Embarrassingly, I actually played Armored Princess for about eight hours before finding out the "Orcs on the March" campaign in Crossworlds is a literal upgrade in every way. Why did I play it first? Well, Steam literally lists it at the top of the series, with The Legend (the actual first of the modern games) listed last! Also, "Armored"? Yuck. Yes, I'm talking about the bastardised English spelling. Oh, you meant what about her appearance? 10/10 fantasy armour; I think it's great.

The game is actually full of charm. It has bright colours and a story and lore that don't take themselves too seriously. Most of the story and quests you'll probably skips reading, but there are some like:

https://i.postimg.cc/zGr9KQtd/20250719235214-1.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/HWfGsnQ1/20250719235233-1.jpg

No, I didn't end up fighting him. You really don't want to be fighting a guy named "Vegeto" frfr.

The background music isn't anything special but it fits well with the world they have created. This was all made on a shoestring budget back in the late 2000s, yet despite that, it's a surprisingly competent PC game. I didn't have to fiddle with any settings and, other than lacking a proper windowed mode, everything ran great with no crashing and only a few minor bugs here and there.

The quality-of-life features for many parts were good, things I wasn't expecting an older game to have, much less so factoring in their budget. You have an "instant finish" option for weak troops, an auto-combat mode, nearly everything is detailed with information to assist you, and there are loads of different units, abilities, and magic spells to learn, plus interesting mechanics like usable equipment you can upgrade. It felt very much like the devs played HoMM religiously back in the day and knew exactly what the genre and its players were about. The shift to real-time world exploration instead of a turn-based map was a brilliant change, making the adventure feel more fluid.

However, it's not without flaws. I played the game on Hard instead of Impossible. Despite the mode not explicitly saying you should have completed the game once before, after playing, it's quite clear they expected you to have played it at least once to understand all the game mechanics, troops, items, and encounters. Progression is one of the core lows of the game.

Back when I was playing the base game, I was having fun. It felt like a vast world for you to adventure in, scavenging and digging up treasure everywhere, finding cool loot and troops alongside your pet dragon. He's cute and extremely useful! The items and troops are also somewhat randomised each run; for example, I didn't find that cat ears collar on my Orcs run at all. Everything was going great, until I got to my third map. That's where the difficulty spikes and progression is forgotten as enemies suddenly become a wall. The majority of them are now red to me, which is considered "very strong" to "lethal" to "invincible". At this point, you have very limited choices and options for your own character's power and troops, despite me doing all the quests and scavenging everywhere.

I eventually managed to clear enough to get to the next island, but this is where it became abundantly clear that Hard mode required you to have finished the game before. Every single enemy was a high red to me. Again, that itself isn't a problem, I like a challenge. The problem is that the design philosophy of progression and battle is highly questionable.

This is where one of the "oldschool" mentalities, likely carried over from their love of HoMM, really starts to hurt the experience; a philosophy that honestly should have stayed back in the 90s.

Everything in the game is a limited, finite resource: gold, troops, even the enemies you fight for XP. The game heavily rewards you for the "no-loss" meta and punishes you for not doing so, because losing units is a massive tempo killer that often requires trekking halfway across the map just to replenish, if there are any left. This snowballs, too. Win ten battles without a loss? Here's the level 1 medal, which grants you free Leadership to field even more units, wins more without loss to level it up! By this point, I was already low on gold and troops while still struggling, so I looked up what I was doing wrong before finding out Crossworlds is a literal upgrade and jumped ship.

While Crossworlds is an upgrade with more options, enemies, and quests, the early-to-mid-game progression problem is the same. The game heavily incentivises you to play a "no-loss" strategy. This is just lazy artificial difficulty. It doesn't challenge you to think and be creative with the game's many systems. Instead, it actively encourages cheesing specific units, constant save-scumming, and exploiting game mechanics simply to avoid any losses. This tunnels you into one playstyle that's paramount for progression, which is incredibly stupid and counter-intuitive to their unit designs. They have so many cool and fun army ideas you could use, but on harder modes you are forced into the same meta every time, being actively punished for experimenting and playing how you like.

While the game opens up in the late game, I felt some of that freedom really could have gone into the early-to-mid game. By the time you reach the late game, you've pretty much got a winning hand, and most of the options and choices you get then are meaningless by comparison. My favourite unit is still the Beholder; its paralysing ray saved me quite a few times by putting a huge stack of enemies to sleep!

https://i.postimg.cc/4NtDKG57/20250720025105-1.jpg

He was my MVP, no question. The enemy AI absolutely hates him for some reason; they often just beeline for him like they're personally offended, and I haven't even told them my joke yet! BEHOLDEEZ-