Royal Bounty Remastered

Royal Bounty HD was crafted for the lovers of old adventure RPGs like King’s Bounty (1990). This game has a little bit of a patchy history, being removed (without reason) from the App Store, then being republished through a different publisher.

The graphics are clear and colourful. I didn’t really get the first scene and possibly missed stuff, but it seemed you couldn’t do anything much except race out of the maze or the guard would kill you. Then you take a boat and arrive on a mainland, where you have to keep buying different troops and fighting monsters. (If you get a horse symbol when you click on a building, it means you can interact with it). There are tonnes of chests where you get a choice between money or exp. There are also little sidequests, but no apparent feedback if you fail them. Make sure you take the gypsy-stolen horse straight back to the farm, or it vanishes and then you can’t seem to complete it.

Movement takes a while to get used to: you click to set a path, then click again to follow it. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to respond, so I’ve been double-clicking like mad all over the place. This does make retracing your steps a whole lot easier. It also helps you get to obscure map squares: eg a temple that turns out to be across shallow water. The game figures the route out for you if you click the temple: I had no idea the water was crossable until the path was drawn through it. The same goes for apparently thick trees that are in fact passable. Combat is through this tactical grid, which I managed to switch off (the Quick Combat option) so now the game kind of rolls a dice as to whether I win a combat encounter or not.  It then shows Defeat or Win, and the number of troops you lost. It seems wise to spend as much of your cash as you can, since if you die you lose an encounter and come back to life with far less cash. (And reloading an earlier save doesn’t seem to circumvent this).

You are an adventurer named Jim, just out of the island prison. How you ended up like this is unknown. You have no gold and no army. Angry Cell Guard is chasing your heels. Your first quest is get away from the maze and find a ship. But it is just a beginning of the story. Your road lies across four huge continents, inhabited by a variety of monsters. You are going to visit a desert, frozen lands, go through woods and towns, and in the finale meet your old friend, The Master. En route you’ll have to earn money and gather an army to face him fully equipped. Nevertheless, you will still need a helping hand from Dragons.