Which King's Bounty game to buy, and which two to skip

Six games carry the King's Bounty name on PC, they were made by two different studios over twelve years, and the titles give you almost no help at all. Deciding which King's Bounty game to buy is therefore mostly a question of working out which ones contain each other — because one of the six already includes another, and two of them are side-stories that pretend to be sequels.

Our own record makes the money part easy, so let us get it out of the way. Reading it on 9 November 2026, every one of the six has a logged low under two dollars since 26 September. The cheapest is Warriors of the North at $0.46, at Driffle on 3 October 2026; the dearest at its own best day is King's Bounty II at $1.71, also at Driffle, on 30 September. Add up all six at their individual lows and the whole series came to $5.95. The question is not cost. It is which two of them you can safely not install.

The six games, and what each one actually is

All the structural facts below come from Steam's own store data for each app, read on 9 November 2026, which is the only place that states plainly what needs what.

King's Bounty on PC. Review figures are from our own game data; the lowest price column is the cheapest reading we logged for that game between 26 September and 7 November 2026, with the store that held it. Readings before 26 September are excluded because the feeds then still carried accounts and region-locked keys, so a game page may show a lower all-time figure. Live prices are on each game page.

Game	Year	Needs another game?	Steam score	Low we logged	Date	Store
The Legend	2009	No	91%	$0.90	2 Nov	Fanatical
Armored Princess	2009	No	91%	$0.88	30 Oct	Kinguin
Crossworlds	2010	No — contains Armored Princess	92%	$1.48	28 Oct	YUPLAY
Warriors of the North	2012	No	79%	$0.46	3 Oct	Driffle
Dark Side	2014	No	74%	$0.52	13 Oct	Gameseal
King's Bounty II	2021	No	62%	$1.71	30 Sep	Driffle

Not one of the six is DLC. That is unusual for a series this old and it is the single most useful thing to know, because it means no purchase here can strand you with something that will not launch.

The overworld is real-time and you wander it freely; combat is the part that stops and turns into a chess problem. (Official Steam screenshot)

Which King's Bounty game to buy if you only buy one

Crossworlds. Steam's own description of it is unambiguous: a standalone expansion that includes Armored Princess, two additional campaigns and a world editor. You are not buying an add-on, you are buying the second game plus more of it, and our data has it at 92% positive from 1,659 Steam reviews — the best-reviewed entry in the series.

That makes Armored Princess the one line in the table you can cross out immediately. It is a fine game at 91% from 1,440 reviews; it is also entirely inside Crossworlds. Buy it separately only in the specific case where its price is low and Crossworlds is not, which our record says is the usual state of affairs rather than a rarity — Armored Princess spent the window near a dollar while Crossworlds sat above it. On the best logged day for each, the difference was sixty cents. Sixty cents for two extra campaigns and an editor is not a decision.

Start with The Legend anyway, if you have the patience

Steam describes Armored Princess as building on the foundation of The Legend, and that is the right way round: the 2009 original sets up Endoria, the rank-and-file units and the whole conceit of a bounty hunter who commands armies rather than fighting personally. It is also the most-reviewed of the four classic games in our data, at 91% from 4,039 reviews, which tells you more people finished it than any of its sequels.

What it does not have is the quality-of-life work that arrived later — Armored Princess and Crossworlds both move faster and ask less of your patience. So the honest sequence is: play The Legend if the setting matters to you, skip to Crossworlds if what you want is the best version of the combat. Both were made by Katauri Interactive, the studio that defined the formula, and both are published now by Fulqrum Publishing.

The Crossworlds debut trailer, from Fulqrum Publishing, the series' publisher. The hex-grid battles are the whole pitch.

The Viking pair are side-stories, and the reviews show it

Warriors of the North and Dark Side were not made by Katauri. Steam's store data lists Fulqrum Publishing as developer on both, and they land differently: Warriors of the North puts you in a Viking campaign set generations after The Legend, with rune magic and valkyries, and Dark Side flips the premise so you play the villains against the forces of light.

Both are standalone. Neither needs anything else installed. But our review data has them at 79% and 74% respectively, against 91% and 92% for the Katauri games, and that twelve-to-eighteen-point gap is the clearest signal in the whole series. They are more of the same combat with thinner writing and rougher edges, which is exactly what you want once you have finished the Katauri games and exactly what you do not want as an introduction.

Dark Side's hook is commanding the factions the earlier games sent you to kill. It changes the army lists, not the game. (Official Steam screenshot)

Warriors of the North moves the series north and hands you rune magic. The combat underneath is unchanged. (Official Steam screenshot)

Worth noting that Dark Side is the King's Bounty page Google puts in front of searchers more often than any of the other five, which means a lot of people meet the weakest-reviewed of the classic four first. If that is how you got here: it is not the one to start with.

King's Bounty II is a different game wearing the name

The 2021 sequel was built by Fulqrum Games and it is not a continuation of the hex-grid formula. Steam's description sells it as two halves — explore as an adventurer, fight as a commander — and in practice that means a third-person overworld you walk around rather than a map you sail across, bolted onto turn-based battles. Our data has it at 62% from 5,544 Steam reviews, which is the largest review count in the series and its lowest score: more people bought it than any King's Bounty game, and fewer of them liked it.

This is the half of King's Bounty II that did not exist before: a world you walk through rather than sail across. (Official Steam screenshot)

It is not worthless, and at the sort of figures our record shows it is hard to lose much by trying it. But it belongs at the end of the list, not the start, and anyone who enjoyed the classic games should treat it as a separate purchase decision rather than the next one in a sequence.

The 2021 launch trailer from Fulqrum Publishing. The walking-around sections are the part that divided people.

What the price record says about timing

Almost nothing, and that is useful. Three of the six barely moved across the window: Dark Side's cheapest reading stayed inside six cents over twenty-three readings, The Legend's inside fifteen, and King's Bounty II's inside thirty. The other three swung wider — Warriors of the North's cheapest listing ran from forty-six cents up to eighty, a near-doubling that is still pocket change in practice. In a series priced like this, waiting for a better day is not a strategy; it is a rounding error.

The other pattern is where the cheap listings come from. Five of the six lows in the table above were held by keyshops. Only The Legend's came from an official store, Fanatical. If you are buying four of these at once, you are shopping on marketplaces, so the usual care applies — our guide to buying keys without getting burned covers what to check, and region-locked keys explains the failure mode that catches people buying old strategy games from marketplaces.

Crossworlds adds two campaigns and an editor on top of Armored Princess, which is why it is the one to buy. (Official Steam screenshot)

The bottom line

Buy Crossworlds. It is the best-reviewed game in the series, it contains Armored Princess outright, and at the figures our record has been logging it costs less than a bus fare. Add The Legend if you want the story from the beginning — it is the most-played of the classic four for a reason. Leave Warriors of the North and Dark Side until you have exhausted those two, because their review scores are telling you the truth. And treat King's Bounty II as its own thing entirely: a 62% game that happens to share a name, worth a punt and nothing more.

If this scratches an itch, the rest of the genre is priced much the same way — our strategy games on sale list is built from the same daily readings as the table above, and we have done this same untangling job for Styx and for Prince of Persia, two other series where the names actively mislead.