King Bounty

This game, while fun to play, has one major fault. Namely, one can beat the major villains in the first 3 (or even the first 2) continents and then, by finding all the artifacts, gain enough of an outline of the area to be searched so that one can find this scepter. One therefore wins the game without beating the last 3 villains, who are the most difficult.
There are also problems with the underlying storyline. Why on earth should a villain make a map to a scepter and in the destruction of it merely cut it up into pieces which are then dispersed?
Also why does the instigator of the plot, who has several accomplices with armies of their own, not descend on the five castles the king has, conquer them and take over as opposed to merely stealing the scepter?
As to the game itself, the graphics for the DOS version are inferior to that of the Sega Genesis version.

The Sega Genesis displays the units in a more block like fashion.
In the DOS version, the armies that wander about that you fight only move if you move so the game movements when you are wandering about (your character is shown as a horse moving about a screen, look at screenshots) are more turn-based than real time. However, when you are engaged in a battle, the shooting units (like archers, archmages, druids, orcs, elves, and etc...) have a limited number of shots per battle. Fascinating that a game designer would acknowledge the fact that a body of archers doesn't have an unlimited amount of arrows...
Your character, if you're not playing as the sorceress, has to gain his ability to use magic but when he does it is not an all-powerful ability. The magic is limited by the spell power.
This is merely one of the many dimensions of the game that adds a measure of complexity that is somewhat unexpected given the small (in comparison to say Age of Empires III) file size of the game.
The units have to be paid each week, rather than a one time fee. This provides a challenge to the game because one can't buy 200 knights and march around. One runs out of money rather quickly that way.
Another is leadership. You cannot buy any number of units you wish for various reasons. The first is you are limited to five types of units in your army at one time. Secondly, the number of monsters in these units (each unit consists of one type of monster, like druids) is limited by your leadership. I do not know the exact correlation, but I have found it beneficial to raise this leadership by dispersing the gold one finds around the map to the peasants rather than keeping it. Thirdly, there are only so many monsters at each lair for you to buy. When you enter a forest, there are only x number of monsters in that lair to recruit. If this number goes down to zero, you cannot buy any monsters there until astrologers proclaim the week of that particular monster.
There is another facet of the game that is intriguing to say the least. If one's army only is made up of dragons, demons, or archmages (essentially, any unit that has the ability to fly except for sprites), one can hit a button on the keyboard and start flying. On the computer it is "f." Note, your army has to be entirely made up of flying units for this to work. Hit the same button again to land, but try to avoid doing this around enemy armies. You can fly over them without engaging them.
I found this flying ability to be most helpful exploring Saharia. First I garrisoned all my units (like my knights, elves and such that can't fly) at a castle and then kept only a peasant in my army. I recruited some archmages, I had to go to Saharia and march across the desert to do this, and then dismissed the peasants. Then I started flying. This allowed me to find all the treasure chests of money and artifacts on the continent without engaging an army. However, one can't fly between continents. One has to hire a boat and sail between them.
However, the game is enjoyable because of the myriad options in the game.