Your dialogue is fixed, in fact, so sometimes your character will say things you don’t really like. Not that the roleplaying is really a highlight-dialogues don’t branch, but rather choices are made by picking one of two options during the course of a quest. It’s a nice touch, but might leave you feeling cold if you’d like to be a polite, non-anarchic chaos necromancer, for example. They’re the alignments of King’s Bounty, the equivalents of Mass Effect’s Paragon and Renegade, and they line up with the story’s possible endings. Those are also the four tenets which characters follow in the game, that powers are divided into, and that quest branches fall into. The troops themselves gain experience, and come from a customizable roster divided into four factions: Order, Anarchy, Power, and Finesse. Your commander gains experience over time, getting stats that buff up your troops and magical powers to blast enemies. It doesn’t matter that much in the end because for every five minutes of good tactics bit there’s ten of minutes staid RPG world-wandering. So there’s systems to play with in the game, but nothing too delightful. It shows little of the interesting mechanics you’d want from a modern tactics game, like forced movement or battlefield manipulation. It’s serviceable combat, but the UI does it no favors and the details are predictable systems: Skeletons take less damage from arrows, fire attacks burn enemies over time, and spirit creatures are resistant to non-magical attacks. Those troops fight in tactical battles, with five units dancing around tight hex-based arenas. You don’t fight the battles, mind, you stand on the sidelines like a kind of Commander/Cheerleader/Magical Artillery Piece and direct your troops around. You then go out and wander the world, doing lots of side quests and fighting battles. It’s absolutely bog-standard and nothing you haven’t seen before. Having been released from prison your character takes on a job for the king, who forgives you for whatever reason, and then goes wandering about trying to prevent a fantasy magical apocalypse because a wizard told you you’re the chosen savior. In King’s Bounty 2 you pick one of three characters to take through the main story, each of which follows the same plot.

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