King’s Bounty Overview
King's Bounty is a turn-based fantasy strategy game where the player's ultimate objective is to locate and retrieve the Sceptre of Order for the king. Players choose from one of four character types, each beginning with a distinct initial force, though this choice does not affect the king's support. The core activity involves assembling and managing a paid army of diverse creatures to explore four progressively more difficult maps and defeat visible enemy forces.
Progression is tied to capturing enemy-occupied castles, which grants experience levels. After specific level thresholds, the king promotes the player, unlocking access to recruit stronger cavalry and knight units directly from castles. Most other creature types can be found and recruited in the wilderness, with available quantities influenced by the player's level. A key strategic element is financial management, as troops require regular pay to prevent desertion or mutiny.
The game world is persistent and features consequences for player actions. While maps can be fully cleared of foes, leaving captured castles undefended risks random monster incursions. Defeat in battle sends the player back to the king's castle with minimal forces, but defeated enemies also permanently lose their fallen troops, only replenishing their ranks weekly. This creates a challenging dynamic against the most powerful foes, whose massive armies cannot typically be overcome in a single engagement, requiring multiple attempts to whittle down their forces.
Victory can be achieved at any point by finding the Sceptre, which immediately ends the game. Two artifacts hidden on each map reveal the location of this ultimate objective. The non-linear structure allows players to tackle harder maps early to access powerful creatures, which can then make clearing earlier areas fair or easy. A global time limit pressures the entire campaign, with its strictness scaling according to the selected difficulty setting.
