There wasn't much official business for us to write home about this year. In fact, 2008 can be described as one long "slow news day". Heroes V kept rolling along at a decent pace, selling fairly well and getting OK reviews. Tribes of the East got decent marks back in 2007 (IGN 7.9/10, 1UP B-, GameSpot 5.5/10), and fans were also relatively happy. The biggest Heroes news this year was the long-awaited release of patch 3.1 on August 19th. While addressing a host of issues, it left the fans dissatisfied with the inability to fix the game's balance problems. On the same date as the patch release, Fabrice Cambounet announced he was stepping down as Heroes producer, with Erwan le Breton (the TotE producer) taking over while Fabrice would focus on Heroes Kingdoms.

By far the biggest development in 2008 as far as we're concerned was the success of King's Bounty: The Legend. GameSpy was the first major site to publish a review of the game, giving it a score of 4.5 out of 5 back in September. Reviews of a surprisingly high grade kept ticking in (IGN 8.1/10, EuroGamer 9/10, GameSpot 8/10) and news of an expansion called The Princess leaked in early November. And that's not all. With the end of the year, various awards and rankings for 2008 have now been released.

For 2008, King's Bounty: The Legend received the coveted Strategy Game of the Year award from Voodoo Extreme, a 33rd place on EuroGamer's top 50 games (ahead of games like Saints Row 2, Mass Effect and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning), as well as honorable mentions from Gamasutra's Top 5 PC Games awards.

I'm sure more sites will issue their 2008 highlights in due course, and that bigger games will most likely overshadow little King's Bounty. Still, there can be no doubt that (from a quality standpoint at least) Katauri Interactive have come up with a very good little game.