It perhaps shows how ephemeral our hobby is that none of the major companies responsible for pushing the first decade or so of commercial computer RPGs exist anymore. Sir-Tech, who created Wizardry and got the ball rolling on the market, collapsed in the early 2000s. Origin Systems, the developer of the mega-hit series Ultima, was devoured by EA and formally disbanded in 2004, though they functionally ceased to exist well before that point. SSI, who made the wonderful Gold Box series of Dungeons & Dragons games, was absorbed into Ubisoft in 2001. Interplay, the original developer of Bard’s Tale, Wasteland, and Fallout, technically still exists but only as a loose collection of tenuously-held IP rights. New World Computing, the creators of the Might & Magic series and its spin-offs, was bought out by 3DO and closed in 2002.

Most of the beloved franchises of those companies live on, either through newly-developed titles commissioned by the current rights holders, or by unofficial follow-ups by fans or even the original developers. In the case of New World Computing, the Might & Magic games officially continue with Ubisoft, who now own the rights to the series. Heroes Of Might & Magic 7 came out mere weeks ago, in fact. The iOS platform has even seen a little bit of love on that front, with an iPad port of Heroes Of Might & Magic 3 HD ($9.99) releasing early in 2015. Interestingly, the direct precedent of the Heroes series, 1990’s King’s Bounty, is not under the Ubisoft umbrella, its rights having been bought by 1C Company several years back. They produced a sequel to the game called King’s Bounty: The Legend in 2008, and its success revived the series.

The modern King’s Bounty has done well for itself, but it’s not the only effort to keep the classic game’s particular brand of strategy and RPG going. Developer iosoftware has been keeping the New World spirit alive and well on mobile platforms and elsewhere for nearly 10 years now, starting on the Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC platform. Their first release was titled Pocket Heroes, an enthusiastic, if somewhat shameless, gameplay clone of Heroes Of Might & Magic 2. The developer would eventually move over to iOS with releases of the then-renamed Palm Heroes and another homage title, Royal Bounty. Palm Heroes received a sequel and another name change, this time to Palm Kingdoms, while Royal Bounty would eventually disappear from the App Store.

Royal Bounty HD ($2.99) is the game’s triumphant return to iOS. It’s quite an impressive comeback, too. While there was no mistaking the earlier release for a something of an amateur effort, Royal Bounty HD looks like something that might have been released from a company of New World’s stature in the 1990s. The graphics are more detailed, the music and sound has been marginally improved, and the gameplay has been expanded upon. It’s a major improvement in all regards compared to the original Royal Bounty, and anyone who enjoyed that release or any of iosoftware’s other releases will likely be pretty happy with what they find here. The grafting of elements from the Heroes series into the basic King’s Bounty structure makes for a flavor all its own, avoiding the existential crisis that Palm Kingdoms now faces with the appearance of the actual Heroes Of Might & Magic series on iOS.

Like the games it pays homage to, Royal Bounty HD is a hybrid RPG and strategy game. You guide your hero, Jim, around a fairly large open world, drafting the locals into your army, fighting battles against ferocious beasts, and solving quests. As you battle, your hero will level up and confer greater benefits on his troops, while solving quests will open up new areas of the map and eventually entirely new locations. Your army can be formed from a wide variety of monsters, job classes, and species, and they’ll all work for you willingly, if you can pay the price. Balancing between keeping your coffers full and gathering experience points is one of the main challenges of the game outside of battle. You’ll eventually need to start managing other resources, as well, keeping a functional economy working so that you have enough power to win the battles you must fight.

You can initiate a battle simply by tapping on an enemy group on the map. That will take you to a hex-based battlefield with your units on one side and the enemy on the other. Units will take turns according to their initiative, so you won’t necessarily get to move all of your pieces at once. For the most part, might makes right in these battles. Small numbers of powerful units can usually destroy large numbers of weaker ones, but if both sides are more or less the same strength, it’s more about who has more troops rather than who has the better strategy. Morale is also important, giving you extra turns or causing a unit to sit out a turn depending on how they’re feeling. One thing I like about Royal Bounty HD’s battles in particular when compared to earlier titles from this developer is that the battlefields are a bit smaller, making each move feel more important. Interestingly, this change walks the game back a little closer to King’s Bounty, which had very tight battlefields.

While they feel a bit light on strategy on the whole, the battles in the game are still pretty enjoyable. A lot of that is owing to the massive selection of possible units, and the generally quick pace with which skirmishes resolve. Just be careful to keep an eye on your dwindling forces, because losing a battle will kick you back to the title screen and your last save point. An auto-save ensures you probably won’t lose too much, but it can still be disheartening to fail a battle because you weren’t topping off your dwarves on the regular. Depending on the difficulty you’re playing on, you’ll want to keep an eye on the time, too. Taking actions of any sort advances the clock, and if you’re playing on anything higher than the easy difficulty setting, at least some of the enemy groups will use that time to strengthen their forces, too. Move too quickly and you won’t have enough resources to overcome your foes, but move too slowly, and you’ll never be able to recover. Because of this mechanic, I’d recommend new players start on the easy mode to learn the ropes relatively consequence-free.

That’s not to say that you can’t still paint yourself into a corner if you’re careless. It’s entirely possible to dismiss mission-critical units and find yourself unable to clear a quest that opens the way forward, for example. You might not even realize it until it’s too late, since the lack of a tutorial can make it pretty hard to get a handle on the game’s various systems. Even the opening map shows little mercy to the new player, giving you a short span of time to either run and escape the prison you’re trapped in or gather up enough of the other prisoners to have a chance at killing the guard. There’s very little guidance here, and that could make the game feel a bit overwhelming to an unsuspecting new player. It’s nothing you can’t sort out by playing for a little while, but you’ll probably want to start your game from scratch again after you’ve gotten the hang of things.

If you can bring yourself over that initial hump and forgive the game for a few rough edges here and there, you’ll find a enjoyable adventure that only gets better the more you explore it. I found myself wrestling with the UI to the very end, and really would have liked to have seen more tactical options in battles. The backbone of the gameplay, however, is in exploring the maps and gathering a powerful, sometimes-weird army to overwhelm your foes, and that aspect of the game comes off like a charm. There are so many different types of troops you can recruit that it’s possible to change your army’s make-up like you’d change a pair of socks. Granted, there’s a lot of overlap between how they function, but the sheer variety is still impressive, even if it’s often cosmetic. The map sizes are also quite impressive, with a lot of battles to fight and situations to encounter. I find myself wishing that exploration was more rewarding than it is, but I suppose it’s also nice to have a sense of urgency about things, too. If you’d prefer to just take your time and poke around, the easy difficulty setting will have you covered, at least.

Royal Bounty HD is a very good update of a game that, while not wholly original, is quite enjoyable to dig into and still has few analogues on mobile. I wish more care had been taken in polishing the experience, particularly with regards to explaining things to new players and sorting out the user interface, but perhaps that’s part of the experience. Royal Bounty seeks to take you back to the 1990s, and although it’s willing to put a shiny coat of paint of top of it, you’ll still have to accept that target, warts and all, if you want to appreciate the game on the whole.