King's Bounty: Warrior of the North - Ice & Fire short review

After the flawed but fantastic adventure that was King's Bounty: Crossworlds (review), I was ready for the next chapter. I jumped right into Warriors of the North with the Ice and Fire expansion, which promised to be the definitive version, much like Crossworlds was for Armored Princess. I again set the difficulty to Hard, ready for a challenge. Just to be clear, the base game was done by the original team Katauri, this was their last KB work, and I can definitely see why. The Ice and Fire expansion was done by a contracted studio at behest of the IP owner and publisher 1C.

Looking at the store page, a sense of deja vu washed over me. "Hmm," I thought, "that looks a little too familiar."

Oh, boy. It was.

This is fundamentally the same game as Crossworlds but with a Viking-themed coat of paint. It runs on the same engine and reuses what feels like 85% of its assets: mechanics, units, art, and even music cues are ported over. It feels less like a new game and more like a massive mod, built on a creaking foundation that was already showing its age. The fact that enabling a simple windowed mode still requires manually editing an .ini file (not officially supported) in a game from 2014 says it all.

Naturally, the questionable design philosophies were carried over too, but this time they were accompanied by new ideas that are actively hostile to the player.

The first warning sign came from the script itself, riddled with translation and text errors in the few sections I bothered to read. The feeling of "this is just the same game, except I'm a Viking" settled in almost immediately. At least the new music was a welcome change, until the old tracks started playing and shattered that illusion.

After clearing the first island, I met my first Valkyrie. While visually impressive, she was functionally just the pet dragon and companion mechanics from the previous game rolled into one. By this point, the experience already felt stale. Then I noticed two new "features" from the Ice and Fire expansion that felt specifically designed to waste my time.

The first was the unit ranking system. Individual troop stacks now gain their own experience to level up, unlocking substantial stat boosts along the way. How do they gain this XP? Only through manual combat. Want to use the "instant battle" feature on weaker enemies to save time? Too bad. That doesn't count. Experience isn't even shared; it's only awarded when a specific unit performs an action in battle. This actively encourages players to drag out trivial fights, turning the game into a pointless grind just to keep pace with the difficulty curve.

This leads to an even more obvious design flaw: Army Lock-In.

Imagine you've spent fifty manual battles getting your core units to their maximum rank. These stats are practically mandatory for the late game. How likely are you to swap them for a newly discovered unit and start that entire grind over from scratch? You can't even if you wanted to. Remember, as we established in Crossworlds, the enemies needed for this grind are a finite resource. It's a baffling design choice. Why not a thematic, shared rank for unit types or categories? The system already exist in the game. Ranked up an undead? All undead units get the same boost. It's that's easy. The only logical conclusion is that this system was designed to be deliberately anti-player.

The second change is what finally broke my patience. I learned that the developers removed the flying mount, a feature you received early in the base game after meeting your first Valkyrie. It's now delayed until much later in the campaign. The problem? The maps are largely the same ones from the base game, maps designed with flight in mind. Now, players are forced into tedious backtracking and unavoidable encounters. Backtracking was already an annoyance in Crossworlds; here, it's infuriating, precisely because I'm playing the exact same game I just spent over forty hours on.

Why do this? It's a decision that is purely anti-player and disrespects their time. It would be one thing if they rebalanced the game around this change, but this is literally just taking away player convenience for no return.

The "no-loss meta" is still here, and it's arguably worse. The rank system incentivizes you to lock in your army. The developers even seem to know their design is a pain, since the Ice and Fire content gives you early access to Resurrection-capable units like Warrior Maidens and Runic Mages (functionally just green Inquisitors). Combat has a few new options but is essentially the same, if not more drawn-out. By the third map, some enemy stacks had seven troop types. This doesn't make battles more difficult, just a tedious slog, especially when you can't trust the auto-combat AI and have to manually fight every encounter to avoid losses.

This creates a toxic gameplay loop: The no-loss meta forces you to play manually. The unit XP system forces you to play out even trivial fights. And the bloated enemy stacks ensure those manual fights are a long, drawn-out chore. Every flawed system feeds into the next, maximizing the tedium.