As you approach them, a golden ring appears and the enemies for that tactical combat come spilling out of the bushes or whatever to shake their swords at you menacingly. It's a static world for a reason, though: Encounters are fixed. Though it lacks the fancy touches of other RPGs like a day-night cycle and dynamic NPC behavior, the larger environments do have a real sense of life. Ever wonder where Golems are made, or where the assassin's guild hangs out between jobs? That's in the game.

It has naturalistic touches like workshops, markets, and such. Little details like benches, gardens, and crumbling statues litter it, people wander back and forth, and have small conversations.

The world itself is lovingly designed, though, one of the real plusses of the game as a whole. There's fun in the game, and a bit of humor, but like the tactical battles it's outweighed by the boring bits. The realistic art style is detailed, but it ends up looking like top-end graphics from 2012 when a bit of stylization would have gone a long way-something those who loved the comical, fantasy and fairy tale style of the older King's Bounty games are going to sorely miss. In fact, the game as a whole doesn't really have much personality. I don't speak Russian: it was just nice to stop the flood of hammy performances. I switched the game to Russian after ten hours, which improved the experience considerably. That's not even to mention the writing, which is awful, and the voice acting, which is worse. That wouldn't be a problem if the characters were more interesting: Katharine the mage, for example, is kind of a jerk, where Elise the Paladin is naive to the point of frustration, and Aivar the warrior just kind of doesn't have a personality at all. Your dialogue is fixed, in fact, so sometimes your character will say things you don't really like. Not that the roleplaying is really a highlight-dialogues don't branch, but rather choices are made by picking one of two options during the course of a quest.

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