Dark Side is the weakest, most flawed entry in the series, chiefly because it was severely rushed for whatever reason. The result is a game that's full of fairly obvious bugs, severe tuning problems, and content that feels not properly completed or that really should've been reworked to be more intuitive or less of a time-wasting pain in the butt. And digging in the files, there's lots of evidence of intentions that didn't get executed.

It's sad, because it's pretty obvious the Dark Side devs are fans of the prior entries and had ambitious, interesting plans for how to do something fresh with the existing King's Bounty framework. This isn't a cash-in title made by a company that doesn't know or care about King's Bounty as a franchise. It's an earnest, intended-to-be-quality entry that got pushed out before it was remotely ready and then had patching support cut before that could bring it into a more playable state. Short of a fan patch project, Dark Side is probably never going to exit this raw state.

That said, I think it's worth talking about and documenting. Its approach to Skill balance, though not without its own flaws, is the best overall approach to Skills in the entire series. It has a(n awkwardly implemented) concept of building up a resource base, with some mechanically consequential aspects. Its introduction of teleportation strips away a lot of the tedium of travel, even if you insist on avoiding spending gold on it. Its approach to class balance and distinctiveness is my favorite in the series. Its willingness to give high Leadership units early lets some of these units finally strut their stuff.

It's a horrible mess I can't honestly recommend to someone as a starting point in the series, but there's a lot of great ideas struggling to show themselves through the mass of bugs, missing content, and inadequately polished... everything.

I should also point out that while I'm not going to be talking much about Quests and whatnot, Dark Side is the entry you're most likely to want a guide on hand. Many Quests fail to explain what the next step is in concrete terms, and a non-trivial portion of them involve divining that the game intends for you to talk to some character on an entirely different island you've probably forgotten exists. Portland is a recurring offender, with the game repeatedly wanting you to visit the smuggler or the witch in Portland without clearly telling you that's where you need to go for a given Quest. But even when the solution is closer to home, you can still get hung up on the fact that Quests often intersect. That is, you'll start Quest A and Quest B, and beeline toward completion of A, only to get stuck for no obvious reason partway through -because Quest A can't be advanced beyond that point until you've advanced Quest B to a specific point. Often, the Quest you need to advance doesn't look connected at all, and the whole thing can get really confusing if you're doing a second-or-later run and are trying to blitz straight to key points while avoiding unnecessary fights, especially since your prior run(s) may well have played out so you never saw any evidence that one Quest was tied up in another.

Dark Side is also fond of giving the player choices where you can potentially screw yourself over. For example, on Sandy Island there's three pirates in castles who each have a chain of requests for you to complete. Thing is, they always end in 'kill the other two pirates', and you don't get any rewards from any of the three until you've done so. As such, you really ought to pick one and ignore the other two entirely. Compounding this is that Melia (The female pirate of the bunch) needs to be alive for you to get a portrait of her, and one of the endgame sidequests is harder to complete without her portrait! (So if you don't pick her, ideally you ignore this whole thing until you have her portrait)

I'm actually fond of the basic idea of making real choices, but Dark Side generally doesn't clue you into what you're really choosing between ahead of time, and in a number of cases there's a clearly worst or clearly best choice to boot.

If nothing else, you should save frequently when playing Dark Side.

We'll as always start with a units post -but just as I covered Vikings before everything else in Warriors of the North because they were your early-game faction, in Dark Side I'll be covering the 'core Dark races' before everything else, starting with Orcs.

See you then.