I know, most of you reading are probably going "What the hell, there's a demo?" right about now. But it turns out that, yes, there is indeed an English-version demo that was very quietly released on Monday of this week (I only found out last night). You can get it here: http://files.filefront.com/Kings+Bounty+The+Legend+Demo/;11799044;/fileinfo.html

On to the impressions. I never played the original, however I did play most of the HOMM games on and off, so I was interested in King's Bounty because of the same style of combat. I knew it was going to be an adventure game as well, so it looked like a fun game to try. Well, it certainly didn't dissapoint!

First of all, the artwork is superb. The colors are very vibrant and pretty to look at and everything is done with great care. The units are very nicely detailed and animated, down to swinging necklaces on pirates when they move around the battlefield. The graphics put the latest HOMM to shame.

The combat is familiar to all the HOMM players, with some new twists! First, your hero's skills can determine what abilities your units possess. Putting points in the military skills opens up flaming arrows for your archers, fire attacks for your swordsmen, and the like. Eventually, you also get a spirit chest which is neat addition. When you fight, you get rage. You can then use this rage to summon spirits on the battlefield that are sort of like mini-heroes in that they level up as you use them. For example, you can summon this rock thing that shapes into a giant sword that smashes into a target stack and does damage. This is sort of like a spell, you use it and then it recharges for x number of rounds until you can do it again. Eventually, once you do this enough times, your rock spirit thing levels up and you get to choose whether you want to upgrade its sword spell thing, or give it a new spell that creates a wall on the battlefield. These spirits are a new twist to the traditional combat, and they're very nicely drawn and animated (the huge sword smash looks awesome )

Away from combat, you have your main hero. He runs around the map in real time, talks to people, gets various quests, finds magic schools, temples, castles, so on so forth that he can buy items from and recruit people for his armies. He has 3 skill trees to upgrade, and each levelup gives a certain number of "runes" which are used to rank up skills in those trees and get new ones. This is pretty nicely implemented, I thought, and so far it looks like you'll really have to decide what to pick, since you don't get enough runes to get everything (or even close to everything). Of course, my Paladin hero only got to level 4 so far in the demo..

Anyway, the demo kept me playing for hours last night and I only grudgingly went to bed, cursing having to get up early for work.. it's going to be a great game.