King's Bounty crosses to the Dark Side for its latest expansion

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Somewhere in the great archive that catalogues all games releases, there is a hard-working drone with a clipboard and a marker pen trying to keep track of the King's Bounty series. It's been a mess of expansions, expandalones and DLC for those expandalones since Legend revitalised the tactical resource-based RPG genre way back in 2008 - but as far as I can tell we've not been treated to a proper sequel yet. The just-announced Dark Side isn't that mythical follow-up, but it is another standalone campaign, and one that lets you customise your hero's race for the first time. Will you be a fighty Orc, a crusading Demoness or a spellflinging Vampire? Look, I can't make these decisions for you.

I'll skip the paragraph of impenetrable lore at the above link and post some cold hard facts. Dark Side will feature a new companion system (each character will receive a different one now), along with additional units, artifacts and all that jazz, and "over 100 new quests and 15 new locations". When marketing cracks out the numbers like that I always get the impression that there are no huge mechanical changes on offer, so I'd expect a game very similar to the previous ones - only this time with playable vampires, natch.

Thanks, RPS .

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.