King's Bounty II Preview - Welcome to Antara

The other two ideals - Power and Grace - are also diametrically opposed. Strength means resorting to violent actions, such as deciding to fight evil spirits immediately or fight a powerful Chimera. And sophistication is the use of your intelligence, cunning and secret knowledge to solve problems. For example, instead of immediately fighting these inhabitants, you can look for puzzle solutions or distractions.

Power-type units include wild animals (i.e. wolves, bears and eagles) as well as dwarves (i.e. militias and housecarls). In terms of Grace, you will often see magical creatures such as stone elementals, golems, and wind spirits. To clarify, sticking to the ideal doesn't mean you can't field a different unit type at the start of the game. However, you need to take into account the moral effects when your choices don't match.

Turn-based battles

At the beginning of my heroine's journey to  King's Bounty II  she was released from prison. I then participated in several turn-based combat, many of which were part of quests. Examples include fighting corrupt guards, helping an eagle tamer by defeating bandits at an outpost, helping an entity that ends up summoning undead in a swamp, and talking to a Seer to perform tests.

Veterans of turn-based RPGs will feel right at home. You will move units across hexes, shoot enemies from afar with your missile units, and dash through enemies with your infantry. Since individual unit types are based on units, taking enough damage will result in the loss of several soldiers. Luckily, you can make up for your losses with healing, a post-battle option that costs gold. Alternatively, you can withdraw soldiers from your reserves.

The character you choose doesn't actually fight these battles as a unit. Instead, they will simply cast offensive and defensive spells each turn. Given that I chose Katherine the mage, I spammed Blazing Beam (a spell based on fire) as often as possible.

Flaws that leave questions

Unfortunately, assembly King's Bounty II which I played had a lot of problems. For example, it was a little difficult to determine which unit was supposed to be active during the battle. There is a number indicating initiative, but I sometimes forget which ones have already taken their actions. I'd rather have a bar or feature at the bottom of the HUD showing unit order instead. Similarly, moving your troops will not necessarily tell you if you have line of sight (or if the enemy can see you). This led to moments where I misused my archers and mages because I assumed they would be able to hit targets farther away.

Then there is the general study. While the environments are bright and picturesque, with all the role-playing flair you can think of, the character movements and animation feel clunky. Your character only has two speeds: walking and jogging, which really slows down the pace. Although you have a mount, the controls can sometimes feel unwieldy. You will also need to dismount every time you need to interact with a chest, object, or NPC, which makes the process tedious and frustrating.

Finally, the spell, unit, and inventory tooltips can take some work. I must have sold the wrong items a couple of times because I had tooltips enabled and they wouldn't let me click on another item they were overlapping with.

Keep in mind that this is still an Early Access build of the game, so issues are expected. We were also told that many fixes would eventually arrive.

In any case, this preview build was only meant to showcase the first 10 hours of the campaign. Indeed, the Crownlands region told me of numerous conspiracies and threats, as well as a prophecy related to your character.

Then, when I got the quest to visit the Tower of Mages, I realized that the gate in the village of Rickville could not be opened further than this point. It left me wanting more and I'm looking forward to seeing how 1C Entertainment completes the rest of the journey after release. King's Bounty II 24 of August .