Games that add new twists to the well-worn genres of yesteryear are assured of my attention. The twist in Kong's Bounty: The Legend from Katauri Interactive is blending the established role-playing game (RPG) with turn-based combat. This hybridisation is not totally new and out of this world - it has been done a few times in the past - but games attempting such alchemy are limited in number. With this small amount of competition, surely King's Bounty will be a fresh and exciting gameplay experience? Unfortunately this is not the case as, although among the best of its sub-genre, it is lacking any real punch.

One of the most underwhelming features is the story, which is half-hearted and definitely less than I would expect from an RPG. The tale starts interestingly enough with the game set in the fantasy world of Endoria, ruled by King Mark (isn't it refreshing to see an ordinary, run-of-the-mill name in an RPG instead of the usual tongue twisters like Feldiren or Oglaff Stoutbeard?). Our kind and just king has a very big problem - he has no children and so there is no one to govern Endoria once he passes on. To find a remedy for his curse, he prays to the gods, who grant him a daughter (surely he could have just got himself a queen but oddly there is no mention of one), restoring happiness to the king's heart, safe in the knowledge that he now has someone to pass the burden of power on to. Unfortunately, the ever-deceitful gods give with one hand and take away with the other, as the whole safety of the land is now in jeopardy; undead creatures roam about, giant spiders skulk in caverns waiting for unsuspecting do-gooders, and pirates rob, loot, pillage and plunder their cowardly, black guts out. This sudden increase in danger is an obvious opening for a brave knight and stout leader to come to the rescue, seeking out the source of this dark plague, defying the gods themselves and saving the world from its inevitable doom! However, that hero - the greatest adventurer of them all - is strangely (and quite disappointingly) not you.

Your job is pretty much just that: a job. Assuming the role of a Warrior, Paladin or Mage, you complete some brief training exercises and immediately become servant to the king, with the role of royal treasure searcher. Treasure searcher sounds depressing but it's really not that bad; you still get to explore the land, fight the roaming monsters and return home with bagfuls of loot - but I definitely wanted the action to revolve around me, to make me feel that bit more special and needed. Without the required "I am the greatest hero that ever lived" mentality, it often feels like you aren't really achieving anything by playing the game; the people of Endoria will likely become extinct if you do not come to their aid but with this humdrum story there is very little reason to actually care.

You will care about the gameplay though, as that is anything but humdrum and arguably the main draw of the game. The current recipe for brewing a turn-based strategy RPG is to take the normal go-anywhere exploration, heavily spiced as usual with "go there and fetch me that book because I can't be bothered to do it myself" style quests, and switching to a turn-based, army command mode whenever the player runs into combat. King's Bounty nails this standard formula dead-on by allowing you to take control of an immaculately dressed knight, mounted upon a horse, and placing you in an open, 3D world full of jewels, riches and perils in equal measure. Navigating your knight around this world is as easy as clicking the mouse on unoccupied ground. This single-click also allows you to talk to people, pick up objects such as the mysterious hovering scrolls, trade with shops and accept or reject quests. The mandatory main quests collected from the king drive the story forward and so cannot be rejected, but the optional side quests strewn liberally around the countryside can be completed for some benefit or left so you can concentrate on more important matters. These side quests are not hard to find, as most villagers have a gold icon above their head to attract your attention and they are definitely worth taking the time out for. One example features a lonely old huntsman who has been bitten by a werewolf and needs you to kill the foul beast to recover its blood before he changes into one.

The well conceived quest design continues in the story-advancing main quests, with the first involving the collection of lost items, making exploration a requirement. Other games try to encourage the same requirement to delve into uncharted territory by constantly pushing you forward with the placement of major quests in a fairly linear order - person A in one area requires you to slay some fire-born demon before travelling to meet person B in another region, and so on. This unwavering thrust forwards can be really frustrating, especially if you still have unfinished optional quests in the earlier region but have been unwillingly shoved into the next region to advance the story. Skilfully, this pitfall is sidestepped by King's Bounty, due to all the mandatory quests coming from the king in his well-placed castle, forming a stationary quest-hub similar to that used in the legendary Fable. This "pile of quests" approach gives you a fixed point to pick up and drop off quests whenever you feel like it; this is your game and you are free to enjoy it at your own pace!

Having a central base of operations which you return to regularly will doubtless get some strategy game bells ringing, although the full-blown turn-based warfare is not experienced until combat is entered. Here things get a bit more complex, so bear with me. First of all, that knight you move around the world in the RPG part of the game is actually only a representation of your hero and a group of up to five different types of units, ranging from the standard, hayfork-wielding peasants and archers to the bizarre, walking, triffid-like plants. These readymade warriors can be bought from the castle or the other buildings scattered around the environment, hatched from eggs in your inventory or simply collected while wandering in the wilderness. However, this is not the end to the complexities, as these unit types are actually collections of individuals and the more individuals a unit contains, the more effective it is in battle. The concept of big things splitting down into small things can be a bit confusing at first, but what I find impossible to comprehend is how buying a better sword for your hero improves the damage done by each of the unit types under your control, especially since our hero is the stereotypical commander who never actually fights in battles!

"War is young men dying and old men talking" sums it up quite nicely, as your supposedly brave and valiant knight simply moves close enough to get enemies to attack him on the battlefield. With the enemy enraged, our hero departs to the sidelines to mutter incantations and cast spells, blissfully out of reach of any danger, leaving the younger men to do the dirty work; the knight is your embodiment in the game, unique to you, so he must take a more active role in the action! With the hero providing moral support, the units under your command and those under the enemy's command line up on opposite ends of hexagonal grid. The combat then proceeds in turns where each unit type has a chance to move or attack until the bodies of either your troops or those of your enemy lie crumpled on the ground. Ensuring that you prevail requires some careful, tactical manoeuvres, as usually these grids have one or two objects for ranged weapon attackers to hide behind. For added amusement, the grids also have a random chance of containing an interactive object, including chests, magical, holy statues and landmines. My favourite is the bees' nest; I love ordering my troops to hold their ground while the enemies wander too close and get stung in all manner of unsightly places by the angered bees.

It all sounds pretty promising, but there are some glaring faults in this tactical gameplay, resulting in it being far from the highlight that it really should be. One major downfall is that the tutorial at the start of the game, although refreshingly humorous, is just not comprehensive enough, as no instruction of tactical troop command is given. This lack of direction means that the combat is fairly dull for the first hour or so of play, as either the enemy troop is so unorganized that simply running in and hacking bits off will suffice or you lose the same battles over and over again, with no obvious way of improving other than buying more fighters. This lack of tactics getting off the ground quickly is mirrored in the limited scale of those tactics, in the sense that tactical play is pretty much restricted to hiding behind objects so that enemies take a longer time to get you within stabbing range. This limitation is caused by relying on static environments; if you find an enemy in the forest then you get a forest-themed grid, if you found the enemy in a graveyard then you fight on a graveyard-themed grid, and so on. An improvement would have been to use a Rome: Total War system, where exactly the terrain you met the enemy on forms the battleground, opening up a huge number of tactical doors and forcing you to take more care where you move. For example, moving onto a hill would give you an advantage on the foes beneath but the trees behind could conceal a more deadly threat.

This disappointing "could be better" theme is definitely not true of the graphics though, which are faultless. Less well-made graphics systems fall foul of clipping problems where units merge into one another, creating ugly, deformed monstrosities, or are plagued by horrible stutter, forcing creatures to move jerkily, like badly-oiled robots. King's Bounty has none of these things; the animation of characters moving around the world or trying to rip people's heads off during combat is as free-flowing as water rolling off a duck's back. That reference is fairly apt too, as the character design is wonderfully bizarre, featuring elves shape-shifting into wolves, deadly land fishes that walk on their flippers and leave trails of bubbles wherever they go, cursed ghosts and even a gigantic turtle as a boss - there is probably a ferocious giant duck in there somewhere! All of these characters are highly detailed, as are the stylised buildings and environment; the whole world is so full of colour that it seems to shine with an unearthly quality. This colour drops away to the purples and dark blues when night falls, which in itself is a visual feast but also has a small impact on gameplay; the darkness-dwelling undead fight more ferociously in the dying light.

King's Bounty is proving to be a game where there are some truly amazing elements and some which are good but just not polished enough for a jaw-dropping gameplay experience. This is definitely true of the audio, as the sound effects, such as the clever clip-clop sound whenever your hero struts about on his horse, are very pleasing to hear. Even in battle mode when the action heats up, these sound bytes are still a joy, including such marvels as magically born cleavers slicing through the air and the maraca-like rattle of a Royal Snake's tail. In fact, the best trait of this game is to combine these snippets of sound with the amazing, free-flowing animation and graphics so that you can almost feel the what is happening onscreen - as the archer punches his attacker in the chest your body almost cringes with the impact of the non-existent fist - a remarkable feat that very few games manage to achieve. However, the acoustic experience is sorely let down by the sub-standard music; it's fitting for the fantasy theme, with organ-type church music, but it's just too loud and repetitive for continued play at its default pitch. You can easily set it to a lower volume through the options menu but if you forget to do this then the din will get too much for you to bear in a very short time.

The artificial intelligence that controls everything from enemy movement to how your knight moves from one point to another won't get on your nerves as much as the music but it is far from flawless. Nothing does anything really stupid like walk into walls, which is a blessing, but there are some problems when controlling your gallant knight. One such error that I encountered quite early on caused the mouse cursor to get stuck on an icon and fail to respond to clicks, rooting my hero to the spot. I had to reload the game to get rid of that little inconvenience. And while on the subject of quitting and reloading, there is no prompt to save the game before exiting and many a time I have quit forgetting to save my progress - very frustrating!

Fortunately, with no multiplayer you cannot vent that frustration on anyone else, but the lack of online play is disappointing in today's age of high-speed data transfer. Many established RPGs such as Diablo and even strategy games like Red Alert 3 have caught the multiplayer bug with co-operative matches, so a similar mode would have boosted the game's lifespan considerably. Even without multiplayer though, King's Bounty is anything but a short game, with countless different areas to explore and three different playable heroes to try out - the death for breakfast Warrior, the goodie two shoes Paladin and the magic-mayhem causing Mage. In addition to this, each hero has the obligatory three sets of special skills and abilities that can be learnt after a certain number of hovering, magical stones are collected. For more individuality you can even choose the spells that your hero learns from scrolls so they can be cast in combat multiple times. The combination of all these elements make each hero unique on paper but visually each is identical to the last, which is very disappointing - Paladins will always look as though they have just come out of training school, no matter how powerful or battle-worn they become.

Battle-worn is a succinct way to sum up King's Bounty: The Legend; it has defeated the opposition (not that there are many games of this sort out there to start with, at least not on PC), but only just, and it seems too worn out to do a merry jig or victory dance on the bodies of the fallen. All the stunning features like the graphics, sound effects and slightly tactical combat ensure that the formula is successful, ticking all the boxes for a good strategic RPG experience, but it leaves the game without any standout features to make you go "Wow!" Genre fans will enjoy King's Bounty, which will win them over with some brilliant ideas, but newcomers are unlikely to find much joy in this adventure.

Reviewed by Tom Clark for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).