King's Bounty - The Conqueror's Quest (USA, Europe) ROM

King's Bounty- The Conqueror's Quest is a fantasy strategy game with strong RPG mechanics. Players choose a hero character who roams an overworld map, recruiting armies from a diverse selection of units, collecting experience and gold from victories, and finding caches of loot. King's Bounty is not truly an RPG experience, though- rather, the RPG elements aim to augment and diversify the core wargame-like battle mechanics. Players won't find a compelling plot or even keep the same character through multiple sessions. There are only a handful of available hero characters in this version and the game's graphics feel exceedingly basic, but don't be fooled- there's a lot of math chugging under the hood. Other entities in the overworld (monsters, other heroes, neutral settlements, etc) act independently from the player so gameplay always has some degree of unpredictability. Furthermore, there are a huge number of spells and units that can be used by the clever strategist to create new strategies and combos, making the game feel fresh with each playthrough.

Players may recognize many elements from the Heroes of Might and Magic franchise, several versions of which are still very popular for both solo and competitive play. Other players will recognize the King's Bounty name from Russian publisher 1C's franchise reboot in the late 2000s. In fact, it might seem natural to call King's Bounty- The Conqueror's Quest a "HOMM clone." Let me set the record straight so we are not confused about this: Heroes of Might and Magic is in fact a "King's Bounty clone." King's Bounty predates HOMM by 5 years and introduces most of the latter's characteristic gameplay paradigms. That being said, the two games were designed by the same person (Jon Van Caneghem) and published by the same firm (New World Computing). The two franchises have diverged from each other in their contemporary incarnations, the IPs having changed hands several times before French giant Ubisoft began publishing HOMM and Russian giant 1C began publishing KB.

I whole-heartedly recommend this game for fans of strategy, but also for anyone interested in an oft-forgotten nugget of gaming history.

Sadly, I would not recommend the 1C versions any more than I would recommend Ubisoft's HOMM entries (which is to say, not at all).