King's Bounty II

King's Bounty II is the modern sequel to a fantasy tactics franchise stretching back to a 1990 Commodore 64 game — a series built around a simple, beloved formula: explore an open world as a questing hero, recruit an army of fantasy units along the way, and resolve conflicts in turn-based battles where positioning, unit type and terrain matter as much as raw numbers. This entry rebuilds that formula in full 3D for the first time, released on 24 August 2021 by 1C Entertainment. Five years on, it sits at Mixed on Steam — roughly 62% of 5,524 total reviews — a genuinely split verdict that has held steady since launch, sharpened by two specific developments in the years since: an explicit cliffhanger ending that was never resolved, and a studio that was swept up in major corporate upheaval within a year of release.

A sequel that plays like a different game

The single most common thread across King's Bounty II's review history, on both sides of the recommend/don't-recommend line, is a version of the same observation: this doesn't play like a King's Bounty game. "This game is really a King's Bounty game in name only," reads a 180-vote negative review with 193 hours logged. "It seems the developers mostly ignored what made the previous games so much fun." Series veterans in particular describe missing the classic formula's signature elements — a multi-region overworld map, randomised unit encounters that made replays feel fresh, and an isometric camera swapped here for third-person 3D. "What if we took everything that was good about the franchise, ignored it, then spent all our time on the 3D modeling?" reads one representative 2023 review. "Zero RNG randomizer elements; the thing that ma[de the series distinctive]."

What makes this genuinely a split rather than a pile-on is that a real, substantial share of reviewers — including confessed series veterans — land on the opposite conclusion once they treat it as a new game rather than a direct sequel. "I completely disagree with most of the criticisms raised in negative reviews," reads a 2026 review from a player revisiting after replaying the original. "This is not an old good 'King's Bounty,' you probably remember," reads another, more measured positive review with 70 helpful votes. "I would not call it a sequel. It would be more correct to say it is a new game in the same genre." Reviewers who make peace with that framing consistently praise the turn-based combat itself — meaningful terrain and formation considerations, a reasonable unit roster, genuine tactical decisions — even when everything wrapped around it disappoints them. Playtime data backs up that there's a real, engaged audience beneath the Mixed score: multiple reviews in the sample log 150, 200, even nearly 900 hours, describing repeated full playthroughs across different classes.

An ending that was never actually an ending

The complaint most specific to this game, rather than a general "it's not like the old ones," concerns how it ends — or rather, doesn't. King's Bounty II's story closes on an explicit cliffhanger, with the game itself directing players to wait for story DLC to see how it resolves. "When you 'finish' the game, you don't get an actual ending," reads a 2022 review. "The story goes 'on pause' and you are told via pop-up to wait for the DLC for the story to continue. Kinda scammy." That DLC was never released. Community discussion threads on the game's own Steam forum, active as recently as 2026, still ask variations of "where is the ending?" and "is this game confirmed dead?" — years after launch, with no resolution ever delivered. A specific, recurring bug report adds to the sense of a game left unfinished: several reviewers, as recently as 2023, describe equipment and skill damage bonuses silently dropping to zero effect past a certain point in the campaign, a bug present in the sample checked with no confirmed fix.

What happened to the studio

The reason the promised DLC never arrived has a documented, dateable explanation, and it's worth stating plainly rather than treating the abandonment as an unexplained mystery. 1C Entertainment, the studio that made King's Bounty II, was sold from its parent 1C Company to Tencent on 25 February 2022 — the day after Russia's invasion of Ukraine — as part of a broader divestment of the company's international operations. That June, 1C Entertainment was renamed Fulqrum Games, the name under which the studio and the game's Steam listing operate today. That window — early-to-mid 2022, less than a year after King's Bounty II's launch — is exactly when a story-completing DLC would have needed to be in active development, and it landed in the middle of that ownership change and corporate rebrand instead. None of this excuses the decision to ship a game with an unresolved cliffhanger in the first place, but it does explain, with real specificity, why the follow-through that would have addressed one of the review sample's most consistent complaints never happened.

How it has aged

Five years on, King's Bounty II reads as a genuinely ambitious, genuinely flawed attempt to modernise a beloved 30-year-old formula, permanently incomplete as sold and unlikely to ever be finished now that its original studio has been absorbed and renamed. The achievement data shows a real but front-loaded audience: a top achievement around 90%, tapering to a median near 13%, with the hardest sitting around 2.6-4%, consistent with a game a meaningful number of buyers start and make real progress into, but where completionist engagement drops off faster than in some of this batch's other titles — plausibly connected to the story's unresolved ending giving less reason to chase full completion. The combat system itself has aged well by most accounts in the sample; what hasn't aged at all is the promise made at the credits.

6 out of 10. King's Bounty II is a legitimately divisive game rather than a quietly disliked one — solid turn-based combat and real production ambition sit inside a structure that abandoned enough of its namesake franchise's identity to genuinely upset longtime fans, wrapped around a story that was never finished and, given what happened to its studio in 2022, almost certainly never will be. Approach it as a new tactics RPG that happens to share a name with something you loved, not as the sequel its marketing promised, and budget for a sale rather than the NZ$65.95 asking price.