If you do not want to read spoilers, I suggest not to continue reading this one.

Further into the game, it shows more surprises. If you are somewhat known with Lord of the Rings Online, and its Legendary Weapons, the King's Bounty has something that is somewhat similar in idea.

You'll at some point acquire a box, the Rage Box, it will be in the main quest so you will not be able to avoid it. That box will somehow be 'attached' to your soul. In other words: You are its master.

The box contains four creatures, 'Rage Spirits'. Each of them has its unique strength. Two of those you will likely be able to use soon with reasonable ease. Those spirits want to be convinced why the hell they should serve you. The other two, you will have to be a bit further into the game to be able to convince them as they require certain items that won't be available that early yet.

When you go into the battlefield, you will have mana naturally to fight the enemy with your spells. Next to mana, though, you will have rage. With this Rage Box, it is when the rage will become useful. Instead of using mana, you use rage to call on the abilities of those Rage Spirits in the battlefield. Just like the spellbook, you will be able to use them once every combat turn. (Though you can upgrade the spellbook later via skills)

So, that concept was pretty neat. Especially as you can talk with those spirits and figure out where they are from, how they got in that box, etc. Some are quite sympathetic. They can be leveled up and more and more abilities will be available. It looks like your own levelup popup window, you can choose one out of 2 abilities to add to your spirit which just leveled up.

Unlike Age of Wonders, this is one giant storyline. It is a RPG where you can advance almost solely by a lot of combat. So, you will have to go into the hexagonally tiled battlefield more than a gajillion times.

Those side quests are not necessary to advance in story, except that you likely will have to do them in order to gain enough experience to be able to advance in story at all. Sometimes you will have to battle bosses, and if you have a paltry army, you won't be able to defeat them at all. So, that is where you do all those side quests to be able to gain enough experience (and crystals, and leadership, and runes, and skills... etc).

If it were just a short game, it is reasonably easy to keep paying attention. Unfortunately, for this type of game, its storyline is long. Very long. Very, very looooooong. Not that it is a bad storyline (heck, it even got some Discworld references!), but to do all those battles a gajillion times is just plain and simply tiring.

However, if you absolutely love those kind of battles, and you can't have enough of those, this game might be your wet dream come true. I, however, do like those kind of battles, but I can't stand having to do them just to be able to advance in the plot, and especially not a gajillion times.

An annoyance, besides the gajillion battle scenes which all start to look alike after a while, is a lot of moving around. Go there, go elsewhere, do this there, then that in another location. It just gets a little bit tiring. I sometimes wished for a teleport spell or something to instantly bring me to the other side of the island already.

I resorted to cheating, because all those battles were starting to tire me out very much. I simply wanted to advance the plot, see what comes out of it. Man, the plot got more and more complex, I can tell you. Overall, though, it is an interesting enough storyline, and I hope there'll be other kind of games with that kind of storyline. Something where you don't need a gajillion battlefields to advance.