King's Bounty: Crossworlds

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Спасибо Папичу, что напомнил про легенду

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Перекрестки миров - это контент-пак поверх оригинальной игры "Принцесса в доспехах". На первый взгляд кажется, что больше контента - лучше. Но на самом деле нет. Орки со своим адреналином дико несбалансированные. Они слишком сильные. Их щедро насыпали по всем локациям, нарушив оригинальное разнообразие фракций. Игра становится дольше, но... Это ей наоборот вредит. Лучше купить и пройти оригинальную "Принцессу в доспехах"

Have you ever had the experience of being dragged to a pub you didn't particularly want to go to, only to stumble upon that one drink which completely set you off, and before you knew it, you’d spent the next six hours flailing around the dance floor like a madman, only to finally emerge from the trance to find yourself lying on your own couch with a splitting headache, unable to work out how or why any of that happened? That's kind of how my experience with King's Bounty: Crossworlds went. I was diligently going through my backlog, trying and writing off games I'd purchased 15 years ago which had aged about as gracefully as cottage cheese out in the sun, before this title came into my sights. I shrugged and launched it, thinking it'd probably last about 20 minutes before I disregarded it as no longer appealing, just like the last five games I'd assessed. Then, 8 hours later, my spine submitted a formal protest against the prolonged inactivity, and I finally realised that I hadn't moved from my seat this whole time, and Amelie had somehow already reached level 15 and conquered five islands by assembling a legion of demonic death machines, without me being able to tell when or how the change had taken place. It's difficult to pin down how the game had managed to captivate me so effectively. See, I did play King's Bounty: Legends before this one, and hadn't come away with any particularly flattering impression of it: the story was a load of text dumps, with every character spewing their life story at you the moment you clicked on a dialogue option, made only more unbearable by the wonky translation; the turn-based combat was serviceable, but marred by poor UI and the macro-level design, which expected you to wade through a map full of sprawling combat encounters with finite, non-renewable resources, while it was blatantly obvious that the game hadn't mapped out the difficulty or progression curve with any degree of care, leading to an egregiously unbalanced experience; and the game in general just represented Eurojank at its worst: unpolished in a way that was more hampering to the enjoyment than charming. And Crossworlds really isn't too different from its predecessor in any of these areas. So what really changed for me? Well, I think the crux of it may have been the setup. Legends started off with the bog-standard tutorial sequence to show you the ropes, whereas Crossworlds just threw you right into the deep end with little to no guidance offered. And ironically, that might have been the easier sell to me: right off the bat, you are a princess who arrives in another world to rally troops, and you are immediately joined by a small dragon who flip-kicks enemies and lays eggs to bolster your forces while spending the intervening time dozing off. Then the game world sets you off chasing one objective after another: collect resources, fight the weaker mobs, receive a new objective, get stronger and fight the slightly tougher mob, rinse and repeat. It is almost doing the same kind of thing that XCOM 2 does to your psyche: keeping you hooked by constantly flashing new gameplay opportunities at you which would feel like a loss if you didn't take them, only in this case it's the Eurojank variety, with a rather callously laid-out structure which seems uninterested in offering any kind of cohesion. That being said, however, now that I've woken up from the trance-induced compulsion to play, I'm not sure if I'd go back to it, or even recommend the game at all. The watershed moment came when I was at the tail end of that eight-hour blitz, staring down yet another level full of oppressive enemy encounters with no regard for pacing or difficulty curve, knowing that anything less than a no-casualty run would make everything that followed even worse, and starting to seriously consider using cheats just to bypass the challenge. And that was how I knew the spell was broken. The game had enough charm in its aesthetics, atmosphere, and scrappy middleware energy in the early parts to draw me in, but once I got past that, it became painfully obvious that the game's demand for meticulous planning around its finite resources and unfair encounters doesn't really work when the game itself hasn't set up the kind of level structure or player guidance necessary for that sustained resource calculus and micromanagement to be enjoyable. So in the end, Crossworlds failed to retain its grasp on me. I came away with the same realisation I reached after my initial hour with Legends, which is that this kind of thin-on-the-ground macro design is simply no longer satisfying in this day and age, because it leaves its underlying core gameplay loop unsupported and unsustainable in the long term. And that is something which no amount of scantily clad Russian waifus or fuzzy dragon companions is going to fix.

прошел игру с зеленого сайта, но игра слишком хороша пришлось покупать

Одна из лучших русских игр. И этим всё сказано.