The graphics are a bit better in Armored Princess; not groundbreaking but it does look a bit more polished. I love the color schemes used in the game and the art direction is great. It gives off a really old school vibe in that it’s a very relaxing, almost serene game...well, until a band of giant worm things attacks you.

It’s also challenging, particularly early in the campaign and if you get off to a bad start you can find yourself with no money, poor troops, and no way of really getting a leg up – in fact I had to start completely over after the first few hours, and after taking better care of my units and planning things out accordingly I was off and running.

There are a lot of quests to perform and along with that a lot of text to read. It’s all wonderfully bizarre and I truly have no idea what the plotline was or what was going on other than I was sent to another world to finds stones to do…something. I lost interest in the walls of text after the first few campaign islands were complete. I’m all for a nifty story in my strategy/RPGs, but the writing was just a bit too ‘out there’ for me. I also didn’t care for the fact that I had to play the Princess. One of the things I loved about the HoMM games was that you had various hero types for each city type. In King’s Bounty you can craft your hero to be whatever you want – spell focused, might focused, whatever, but you are only playing as this one heroine. Period. This isn’t new to King’s Bounty; I just miss the option of a custom avatar.

There are so few games like this around these days that 1C is forgiven to some extent for not crafting a sequel with newer ideas and basically adding some doo dads, a few design updates like fast travelling between islands, a new lizard race, a few new unit types, a new campaign and slapping a $40 price tag on it. Fact is, I lost a lot of sleep due to Armored Princess, and gleefully played until the wee hours of the morning so despite its familiarity, it’s impossible to not recommend it.