pyroBlog

Lately I’ve been playing King’s Bounty: Armored Princess at Tycho’s recommendation, and at steam sale prices it was certainly a worthy purchase. The primary gameplay is turn based strategy on a hex grid.

Done.

That said, and this may simply be my disillusionment with games in general speaking, the gameplay is somewhat formulaic. There is an option available in every single battle to do “autocombat” wherein the AI takes control of your armies and fights for you; you are able to take back control at any time. This feature is nice, but is limited by the facts that it doesn’t allow you to skip the animations and the AI sometimes makes painfully dumb moves. Ten minutes of watching (potentially inept) automated combat isn’t the most entertaining thing you could do, so you’ll probably want to fight most of the battles yourself. The decision making involved isn’t terribly difficult and the scale of any given battle is small enough to easily hold in your head, so the main effect of the game is the emotional impact of watching your armies die. Forever. The entire game world is built on a limited resources model, so if you achieve one too many pyrrhic victories you may find yourself unable to progress later in the game. Furthermore there is an in game time system that is potentially fed by realtime despite the fact that all other aspects of the game are turn-based.

If any of that sounded good to you, it might be worth a try: http://store.steampowered.com/app/3170/