14 DAY TRIAL // King's Bounty: Legions is the latest of the serious video games to get a release on Facebook, in beta form, and I quickly delved into the turn based video game to see how it was adapted to the platform and what it can offer in what is becoming a pretty crowded landscape, with the likes of Dragon Age: Legends from EA2D and CivWorld from Firaxis.
The new King's Bounty Facebook game is created by Nival in collaboration with KranX Productions and, after a few hours of play, shares quite a lot of its mechanics with the PC game on which it is based.
The main feature of the game are the turn based and hex determined battles, where two sides meet head on and players need to deploy magic, special abilities and tactics in order to win the engagement.
This part of the game will be instantly familiar to those who played the King's Bounty game and its expansions and is deep and offers quite a few choices even at the lower levels.
Outside of battles the player is able to manage his army and his skills as well as gaining new magical powers and more items by performing quests for a variety of characters that can be met on an overland map.
The main limitations are the amount of gold a player has to spend on his army and the stamina that he needs to get from one location to another.
I can't yet tell whether there is an overreaching story to King's Bounty: Legends or whether the game is only made up of small quests that have little link other than the game universe.
The monetization in the game is done via a Royal Shop, present in each one of the cities, that allows players interested in spending a little money a way of getting farther ahead in King's Bounty: Legions, by getting auras that help them in battle, more units, more stamina or even licenses, which allow them to outperform players that are of a similar level.
The game also has Player versus Player battles but at the moment the matchmaking seems to be a bit off and until now has only paired me with players that are way more advanced than me, resulting in quite a few losses and precious little wins.
