King's Bounty: The Legend.
Its been a while since I played a game to literal exhaustion. Late one evening I switched off to read the manual and some guides but once deprived of the adrenalin of play I passed out...
It appears to use a lush version of the Warcraft 3 engine (a guess on my part) and is quite beautiful. I thoroughly enjoy the turn based combat on a hexagonal grid, Its nice to get an SRPG on the PC (a staple of my DS library) that's a visual as well as gameplay joy.
Some caveats though, the english translation is a bit iffy in places, but not terrible, there's no voice acting its just poorly written like my posts.
You're thrown in head first. There is no tutorial at all on the major mechanic of hiring armies! Once you get out of knight training buy whoever you can afford from the king and the temple to your left.
Enemy armies/monster encounters are displayed on the adventure map but you need to invest in the scout skill to determine how strong they are and their make up. The starting area has encounters you can beat right now, and encounters you won't until you're many hours older and as much as 8 to 10 levels higher, walking around right near each other. Thankfully you're a knight and that comes with a horse and you can lure enemies on the adventure map away from their guarded treasure. You can always flee a battle once its started, but as the commander it comes at the cost of your army etc...
As an added plus to all that srpg goodness, its loaded with quick and quirky quests (they're all tongue in cheek) and a deep magic system that covers the gamut of regular spell books, scrolls and mana to directly aid your troops in battle, to demonic rage fueled super powers you can call upon to turn the tide by bargaining with powerful sorcerers trapped in Pandora's box (which you find early on). Oh and a skill tree like Diablo 2/3 for your hero, and items of power to wear, oh and wives, and children... and mods.... and an expansion due out very soon... I'm not going to get much sleep for a while.
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