Which one is it?

They are all.

TL and AP are on top of the list in my book. DS makes a good impression, but I haven't played it completely though I like it a little bit more than WotN which also still awaits to be played through (were's all my time gone?).
If you plan on only buying AP, I recommend to go for Crossworlds because it offers even more content.

Metascore / user score on metacritic:

The Legend 79 / 8.9

Armored Princess 82 / 8.7

Crossworlds 78 / 8.6

Warriors of the North 74 / 6.9

Dark Side 73 / 6.4

The Legend will always be my favorite. I loved the story more and the spirit characters more than the backup characters in the other games. Armored Princess is good. I thought Warriors of the North was boring, mostly since it's made up of the barbarian class and I found them boring. Dark Side is good so far, I haven't finished it. I couldn't put The Legend down, though. <3

The most balanced of the games is Crossworlds/Armored Princess, I believe.

The most fun to break is Warriors of the North with the Ice&Fire DLC (seriously, it gets laughably out of hand)

The consistently hardest is Dark Side (by which I mean on Impossible going for no-loss and not using the "Dragons and win" easymode, it gives a challenge that is fairly stable, unlike the other games which tend to be very very easy and then suddenly have boss fights which are sometimes abruptly and viciously hard)

Just my opinions from playing them all through twice.

The Dark Side can sometimes be frustratingly vague about what you should or even can do next. Some of this might be due to translation issues, but in other cases they were trying to go for "figure things out yourself" (which is fine) but left no real indication whether you *could* actually do so now - sometimes it looks like you can/should/need to do such-and-such now when in reality the answer won't unlock for several maps yet.

There are still some very annoying bugs that can break quests or make enemies absurdly tough/fragile, too.


Overall I'd say that the Armored Princess/Crossworlds version is the strongest installment of the series. It doesn't have the bugginess that still persists in WotN or Dark Side but (with the expansion in place) does have all of the elements that really represented an advance over The Legend.

My personal favourite is The Legend although all of the games are good. TL has a particular charm, a certain something, that makes me keep coming back to it. They all play very similarly but all have a different 'twist'. For me, my order of personal favourites is; The Legend, Warriors of the North, Dark Side and then (bucking the trend!) Crossworlds/Armoured Princess.

I actually like Dark Side the best: it's the most varied and consistently interesting, I think. The Legend has late game balance issues (the last boss fight is bizarrely easy after a long stretch of difficult areas with few reinforcements). Armored Princess/Crossworlds is my second favorite- it's well-balanced and everything it adds is fun. Warriors of the North is a mixed bag: on the one hand, the Viking units are cool, and the experience levels are a neat way to reward you for sticking with favored unit types. But, WotN then goes and reuses a bunch of maps, slightly edited, and again has weirdly irregular difficulty. It starts out easy, then gets really hard, then really easy, then really hard again, etc. Also, the experience mechanic is kind of a pain when you run out of a unit type that you've been using as a lynchpin of your army.