Overview: Strategy Games
King's Bounty - the Legend
First there was the game King's Bounty (game of the Year 1990), programmed by Jon Van Caneghem and published by
his company New World Computing. King's Bounty was later followed by a series of well known games:
Heroes of Might & Magic. Heroes of Might & Magic was made as sequel to King's Bounty, it only was renamed
into HOMM to be more profitable, because Van Caneghem's
Might & Magic role-playing-games were well known all over the world.
Jon Van Ganeghem later sold the company New World Computing to 3DO, where he worked on his Might & Magic and
Heroes of Might & Magic series. The King's Bounty license is now held by a Russian company named
Katauri Interactive and they released the game King's Bounty - the Legend in 2008.
It has changed much but fans of the Heroes-series can play it without reading the manual, the most of the gameplay is still
fitting the old well known tactics.
However, the game King's Bounty - the Legend is not very much different from the Heroes of Might & Magic
series, but at least a bit. Your hero is exploring the world in realtime, there are no
AI-heroes to fight against and no city to build up, but there are quests to
fulfill.
Fantasy Wars
In the year 1989 a game named Tank General was born, later followed by Tank General 2 & 3 and also some
spin-offs with names like Star General or Fantasy General. And now there is a new game called
Fantasy Wars, which is following the same good concept as the older games.
Fantasy Wars is played the same way like all it's ancestors, you have to arrange your units on a hexagon map. The game is
a typical turn-based strategy game: Once you've placed your units you start with your first turn on one side/edge of the
map, while the opponent sits at the other side of the map and moves towards your positions.
During the match you now have to kill all units of your opponent, sometimes a special unit has to stay alive to win, and
sometimes you have to explore special buildings, like ruins or shrines, on the map to find some useful items. After you
have won a map, you are able to hire new units, update them, provide them with useful items you found or teach them new
skills. The game is won if you have played (and won) all the maps that are available in a campaign.
Fantasy Wars has three different campaigns, the Human- and the Orc-campaigns have 10 levels (or maps) each, the last
campaign (Alliance) has 8 levels, all in all there are 28 levels to play. You start with the Human campaign, once you've
solved it the Orc campaign will follow and the last one is the Alliance campaign, when you've finished all three campaigns
you have won the game.
Elven Legacy
The successor of Fantasy Wars is Elven Legacy. The concept is the same: You hire units, place them on the
hexagon map, explore different things on the map, move towards your opponents positions and win the maps within a campaign,
win all campaigns to win the whole game. The same with upgrades between the maps... so Elven Legacy is as simple as usual.
While Fantasy Wars had three different campaigns, there is only one left now in Elven Legacy, the Alliance campaign, but
this time it's a pure Elven campaign. The story continues here in Elven Legacy and if you haven't played Fantasy Wars
before, you may not exactly know anything about the background story.
But don't worry, the story is written in a way that you don't really need the background history. And even if the Elven
Legacy campaign is a bit short it is a real good game. There are also three addons available: Ranger,
Siege and Magic.
I don't have more content like a walkthrough or screenshots available yet for this game, I'm sorry.