Once a battle begins, you are placed into a hexagonal grid of various dimensions, with the most common size being 7x9.  Your army consists of up to five different types of units, of various quantities, that you have purchased or found during your journey.  Your opponents vary from four to nine opponents.  Each of them, like your armies, are stacks of various sizes.  Each unit attacks the other and moves about the board when it is their turn, based on their speed and initiative stats.  For melee attacks, in most cases the attacked party will have an opportunity to retaliate, so attacking vastly superior units is usually wrought with peril.  Ranged units usually get off scot-free, though being in a melee situation with a ranged unit often doesn't turn out so well.  There are many, many different special abilities that various types of units have available to them, which makes battles highly varied and exciting.

Before issuing orders to a unit, you can choose to cast a spell, or attack with your pet dragon.  You can cast one spell per round.  Once all units have had their turn, the next round begins.  Spells cost mana, which takes time to recharge in between battles.  Spells can be very powerful, and the right spell at the right place can easily turn the tide of battle.  Effects range from direct damage, to powerful buffs or de-buffs, to summons, and many other effects.  Magic plays a very important part in the strategy of victory in this game.

Your pet dragon does not take part in battle directly, and is not available in boss battles.  During a fight, you accumulate rage as units take damage.  Like mana, this is used to bring additional effects into battle, but these are only for your dragon to do.  He can do things like directly damage one or more opponents, summon creatures, or gather more gold or items from the battlefield.

Your hero, Princess Amelie in three of the four campaigns, and Arthur in Champion of the Arena, can be one of three different types:  Warrior, Paladin, or Mage.  As you gain experience points by defeating enemies and collecting certain items around the map, you gain levels.  At each level up, you gain a certain amount of leadership and talent runes.  The more leadership, the more units you can control in battle.  Talent runes can be spent to gain additional abilities for your hero in the skill tree, which consists of the might, mind, and magic trees.  The Warrior focuses on the might tree, Paladin on the mind tree, and Mage on the magic tree. Each class has one unique skill, which the others cannot get.  The Mage's higher power is the most powerful in my opinion: they can cast two spells per round.

Warriors have the most leadership, rage, attack, and defense, so they make great use of large armies, and the pet dragon.  Mages have the most magic points, and a much lower leadership level, making their armies much smaller.  They can dual cast and have access to some really great spells, including summons, which can definitely make up for it.  Paladins are kind of a hybrid class, without the extreme strengths or weaknesses of either.  A lot of their class skills are extra effective against the undead and demons.  I played as a Mage most of the time.  They have the best skill tree in my estimation; they are not necessarily the most powerful though, especially early in the game.  When you level up, you get talent runes proportionate to your class, so while a warrior can invest points into the magic skill tree, they have many less talent runes to do so.

King's Bounty: Crossworlds is a really enjoyable adventure, with equally excellent graphics and sound.  While the polygon count and such may not be cutting edge, what the game designers have done with the graphical style has made the game quite enjoyable to look at.  The music is just fantastic; my wife has commented on numerous occasions how lovely the music is.  Fortunately, it's all available in the game data directory as standard Ogg Vorbis files.  In my opinion, music can strongly help make a game good or even great, and in this area it comes through in spades.  The sound effects are also appropriately impactful.  There is no voice acting; all conversations are written text.

Despite all of the great things about King's Bounty, the areas where is falters aren't really gameplay related, but significant nonetheless.  GamersGate only supplies the 1.0.0.1 patch.  I experienced a few crashes with this patch, though it wasn't too often.  But what finally drove me to search for a patch was some of the really unbalanced gameplay problems I was having.  I would fight a certain group of Orc Shamans and I would take much more damage than I ever expected.  After this, I found the 1.3.1 patch online.  This solved a lot of problems, but one glaring one remained: if you highlighted the 'Runic Magic' trait of the Rune Mage, the game would crash to desktop.  Searching a bit more, I found the fix on 1C's forums: the Rune Mage hotfix.  Ever since installing these two patches, the game has been running flawlessly, though I couldn't get it to work with the Intel graphics integrated into my i7 laptop, though I can hardly fault it for that.

What I can fault it for is the myriad of appropriateness issues.  It's biggest flaw might be the skimpy clothes on most females, including the main hero, Princess Amelie.  'Armored Princess' is a bit of a misnomer; I'm not sure what armor they are talking about, because it certainly doesn't cover her legs, and if you play as a Mage, her midriff or bust area either.  Which is to say there is about as much covered as your typical swimming gear.  The Warrior and Paladin classes do cover a tad bit more, though it's still as curvy as possible, and the legs would still feel a draft.