King's Bounty: Warriors of the North - The Complete Edition

On its face, the idea is great: Heroes of Might and Magic-style combat in a deep RPG. However, Warriors of the North, like the previous games in the King's Bounty series, doesn't at any point earn the right to be compared in a favorable light to Heroes of Might and Magic. Warriors of the North is more like the half-brained child of a king that is never revealed to the public for fear that the public will see the child's father as incompetent. The ultimate problem with King's Bounty: Warriors of the North is that it's too easy. The starting island can be difficult, but once you have access to more options for units, everything becomes a cakewalk... Assuming you can figure out the 'right' way to play (and if you can't... enjoy greatly increased backtracking). There are units that combine high damage and the ability to resurrect each other and themselves, making most battles only a matter of patience: Hold the enemy melee units off with slows, traps, and other crowd control while you kill them with powerful ranged or retaliation-free attacks, then resurrect everybody that died once you have the enemy down to a few harmless units. Doing this, you can fight 99% of the battles in the game without losing a single unit so long as you can suffer through the tedium of fighting battles that way, with no challenge. The easy difficulty is made worse by the fact that the game is incredibly long... and not in a good way. Expect to take 50+ hours to complete this game, but expect very little outside of the boss fights to be challenging unless you deliberately make it more challenging by choosing sub-par units or fighting battles far above your head. The game is filled with wandering monsters, almost none of which will ever provide a challenge, but which must be dealt with in order to move around the various environments. Whether or not you're fighting every battle without losing a single unit, the game is still incredibly tedious. Especially early on (or if you're suffering losses), you need to backtrack constantly to recruit units. As you progress through the game, you may have to go very far out of your way to recruit units if you use some that are relatively rare. It was a good idea of the developer to give you reserve slots to hold extra, non-fighting units in, so that you can replenish your stock without having to do this... But you only have 2 reserve slots, while you have 5 main troop slots, meaning you can only top up 2 out of 5 units like this. You also may want to consult a guide here and there. Descriptions are sometimes very unclear, with spelling and grammar errors; it's quite clear this isn't a game created by people whose first language is English. Quests in particular can be difficult to follow, as the quest journal will frequently only give you vague instructions that aren't at all helpful. The Ice and Fire DLC expands on both the strengths and the weaknesses of the game: It adds more unnecessary content as well as some new variety when it comes to units, items, etc. It also adds the ability for units to gain levels through combat, giving them slight bumps in random stats whenever they do so. It's a nice addition, but it's completely random what stats are increased, so it's ultimately not a very compelling addition. If what you're looking for is a game like Heroes of Might and Magic, you may be in luck with this one. Just keep in mind that this isn't Heroes of Might and Magic, but rather a single map of Heroes of Might and Magic that goes on for several thousand turns and doesn't have any enemy AI, instead leaving you alone in an oversized landscape to wipe the floor with random units until you come across the occasional one that makes you have to think in order to beat it.