King's Bounty: Dark Side
Skip · RPG · 2014
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $12.99.
- Length
- 35.6h
- Value
- $0.36/hr
- Reviews
- 74% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when King's Bounty: Dark Side is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, nVidia GeForce 6600 with 128 Mb VRAM or similar AMD card, 8 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Time has come to begin a Dark Journey to the other side of Teana and explore a mysterious region never before seen by royal bounty hunters. King’s Bounty: Dark Side lets you play as the villains in a full standalone campaign with new heroes, dark factions, and a fresh tactical perspective.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $1.94, set in December 2021. It has been discounted 76 times in the 12 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 7 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 34 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 68 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, King's Bounty: Warriors of the North ($9.99, scores 56) beats it on value, while it beats Chaos Reborn ($9.99, scores 32).
Steam's global achievement data says about 9 percent of players ever finish it. On a 35.6-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Of the 457 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, none come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 37 percent of the 122 reviews written there were positive, against 74 percent overall, and those are 9 percent of everything written about it.
35.6 hours to finish it, 101 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.8 times the campaign.
The drop-off
54% start to 9% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 35.6-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
107 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Да бывают и такие жемчужины выходят из под пера наших разрабов. Легенду о рыцаре играл еще школьником и плохо помню, знаю что не прошел. Вот принцесску не допрошел в стиме когда-то потому что там на ласт боссе отобрали имбодракончика. Здесь тоже всё гадал будет ли такая подстава от разрабов и таки да имбоприемы на ласт босса отобрали. Хотя ласт босс оказался лёгким довольно. Да и вообще игра ощущается намного легче...
Old game, but tactic is still fun to play with, Spin ur mind to pass the tough game.
I have three pet peeves with this one: 1. Quests are very, very annoying. For whatever reason, they are never straightforward. Ever. Instead of an interesting story and maybe giving a player the choice of doing things the right way or the lying conniving way (after all, you're the dark overlord, beware, maidens and peasants!), it's just 20 steps of going back and forth between the same places, and then gathering...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
King's Bounty: Dark Side scores 39/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/289520/king-s-bounty-dark-sideThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 20, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.