King’s Bounty: Legions Preview

Destructoid is the latest to offer a hands-on preview of King’s Bounty: Legions, the Facebook installment of the TBS/RPG franchise, which they argue is shaping up to be “the most relevant experience to the mainstream gaming community on Facebook to date”. Here’s a sampling:

Featuring over 30 units for you to apathetically order to a premature death, KBL provides an impressive army building experience which, once fully understood, contains more depth than meets the eye. Soldiers are broken down into classes and categorized in several ways which will allow the more astute of captain’s to craft an army tailored to meet individual threats. Each unit in a player’s army belongs to one of five classes; these classes possess inherent strengths and weaknesses when engaging units of another class. This allows players with superior situational awareness and knowledge of the inner workings of the game to better direct their units, resulting in greater success.

As if that were not enough, each unit type’s potential strength is heavily taken into consideration when restricting the units one can use in their army. The weakest unit type available, mortals, are plentiful and may be used with little discretion where the more awe-inspiring immortals and legendary soldiers can only be used in limited numbers.

Resourceful commanders will have access to much more than the keen blades of their legion should they choose to utilize the full array of their arsenal. Magic, available in the form of scrolls which are outfitted prior to battle, will play an integral role in a player’s ability to win the day when the killing fields are particularly gruesome. Ranging from simple healing spells to AOE slowing effects and everything in between, the power attributed to magic scrolls can be the ultimate bane or burden of any foe if used to its full potential. Most units on the field of battle also possess secondary, and in some cases, tertiary abilities which may be tapped to terrifying effect.

Those returning to the King’s Bounty series have yet to experience the challenge of a human opponent, KBL seeks to change that. As the story goes, KBL was designed as an interoffice conflict resolution program where, like the gladiatorial days, human resources disputes and sexual harassment claims would simply be resolved on the field of battle. That would be a much cooler story were it true, though KBL was conceived and designed out of the desire for PVP in the King’s Bounty series. Players killing other players also happen to be Nival’s solution to the limitations of the stamina bar in KBL. Costing no stamina to initiate PvP, you can thrash your mother’s army and call her a noob regardless of the status of your stamina bar. In fact, so heavily encouraged is PvP that taking part in it, win or lose, will see your stamina bar refilled.