Review by: William Abner

Did you like King’s Bounty: The Legend? Did you like it enough to want to play it again with a new campaign and few new bells and whistles? If you answered ‘yes’ then please go forth and purchase Armored Princess, the “sequel” to 1C’s terribly addictive strategy game from 2008. If you had your fill with last year’s game, well, perhaps it’s best to move along.

If you’re still here then you’re likely new to the world of King’s Bounty. In that case you absolutely should pick up a copy of Armored Princess not because of forward thinking game design or anything like that – you should get it because it’s the kind of game that eagerly sucks away hours of your free time, just like all great strategy games have a knack of doing; this is definitely one of those “Holy cow it’s 2 AM!” types of games.

The basic gameplay from the original is still firmly intact. You lead a single hero (in this case: the Princess) across the landscape, picking up magic objects, buying new units, and fighting enemy heroes and wandering bands of creatures. It’s like the old Heroes of Might and Magic (HoMM) games except the enemy creatures tend to move around instead of staying static waiting for you to attack. The overland map doesn’t have “turns” so it’s sort of a real time design except that the roving bands of bad guys have a specific area they patrol so you can find a safe spot and leave the game running without fear of being jumped.

The combat is classic HoMM. You have a grid with creatures on each side and you battle it out in turn based fashion with ranged attacks, spells, and face to face brawls. There are a lot of unit types in the game from the standard human archer to “Evil Beholders” that can force allies to attack each other and fire energy beams from its large eye. None of this is really “new” for anyone with a drop of experience playing these types of games, but Armored Princess tosses in a new Dragon Ally – a cute little dragon that gains levels and acquires powers right alongside your princess avatar. The dragon is shockingly powerful, especially late in the campaign, and can easily turn the tide of a fight with an area of effect ability of a focused crush attack on a single unit. It can even drop an egg which hatches lower level creatures. He’s a handy dragon. The trick in using this little guy is that he needs “rage” in order to do anything so the more you fight the more he can do during an encounter.