"Kingdom Come: Deliverance II" Review

Publisher: Deep Silver

Developer: Warhorse Studios

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

The AAA game industry is, as we all know, in a state of rapid, seemingly irreversible decline. Electronic Arts recently came out and said that Dragon Age: The Veilguard clearly failed because it wasn't enough of a live service, despite it having failed specifically because it had too many live service elements. Warner Brothers recently shut down the studio behind the Middle Earth games and decided to double down on live services despite the multi-million dollar flop that was Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League. Ubisoft is continuing to be Ubisoft with each passing day. These corporations will bellyache and moan about how expensive games are to make and how they can't possibly prioritize anything other than aggressive monetization because otherwise it's impossible to make a profit. Sycophants like Phil Spencer will cry about how they have to please their shareholders and that success in the game industry isn't as simple as making good games. But these corporations, as always, are wrong. Because to paraphrase Larian head Swen Vincke's speech at the Game Awards, if you make a good game, the revenue will follow. Such is the case with the subject of today's review: Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. 

But first, a little step back. In early 2018, an independent outfit named Warhorse Studios released Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a medieval RPG whose ultimate goal was to be ultra-realistic. As a peasant, you had to do things like learn how to read, and persuading other characters to do anything largely involved presenting yourself in as clean a way as possible. Combat was arduous and slow, and mistakes were punished with realistic ferocity. All of this was, understandably, responsible for both quite a bit of disdain from the general public and a bit of a cult following. Last time I checked, the total sales were around the 7 million mark over the years since its release.

So, why did I do that little tangent at the beginning of this review? Well, with everything you now know about Kingdom Come: Deliverance's initial reception and sales-to-date, you're in a good place to realize how significant it is that the sequel sold 2 million copies in under two weeks. For something that was evidently so divisive at first to gain such a massive new following in such a short time is nothing short of astounding. Now, let's get into why this success might have happened!

In Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, you take up the mantle of Henry of Skallitz: a blacksmith's son working as a bodyguard for his noble friend Hans Capon. Henry and Hans have been tasked with delivering a message to the lord of Trosky, but as you may be able to guess, this doesn't go entirely to plan. So, now devoid of an entourage and not looking the part of noble messengers, our hero and his high-falutin' friend have to find a way to accomplish their mission. Obviously, the story is much grander than this, but this is how it all begins. 

For some context on the historical backdrop, both this game and the original take place in 15th century Bohemia (modern-day Czechoslovakia) during the years of war between King Wenceslaus and his nearby relative King Sigismund of Hungary. At this particular point in time, Sigismund has more or less taken the country, with Wenceslaus loyalists pushing to drive them away. 

Despite this being a sequel, you don't need to have played the original to understand what's going on here. The historical backdrop is basically in the same place as in the original, and there's enough information given about Henry's previous exploits to get you up to speed before too long. I only played maybe 10 hours of the first game, so I can personally attest to this. So wherever you are in the series, this sequel is a good place to start. 

My ability to focus has been well and truly borked for this section, so I'll get us where we need to go and then we can move on: the story here is excellent. Unpredictable turn after unpredictable turn, a cast of endearing characters, the works. And it all ends with probably the greatest final push since the Mass Effect games. The last three or so hours are so good in fact, that I would call the entire time and money investment required worth it for them alone. At time of writing, it has been two or three days since the credits rolled, and a particular death scene still dominates my mind. That's how good it is.

So, on to gameplay. As I said earlier, I played maybe 10 hours of the first title, so I have a little bit of experience in every gameplay facet that one covered. It was pretty infamous for having terrible combat in its day, and I couldn't help but agree when I played it...but for some reason it's not just improved in the sequel, it's actually fun. 

Like in the original, you'll see a sort of star in your aiming reticle when you're fighting someone where the points on the star represent angles you can attack from. Combat, with this in mind, depends on changing up your angle to strike places the enemy isn't currently defending. They can still move to block an attack if you aim correctly, so it's a constant dance of strikes, blocks, parries and ripostes, etc to wear an enemy down and deal damage. Different enemies will have different individual combat capabilities and armor loadouts, so the only real strategy here is to play well....which sounds condescending or overly simplistic, I suppose, but it's the truth. It's also worth noting that despite the presence of parries and ripostes, this isn't the "win" button it usually is. Like with anything else, an enemy can move to block a riposte. So you can easily go for a combination of like ten ripostes in a row with the enemy blocking, using that block to riposte to you, you doing the same, etc. It's a matter of getting the enemy just fast enough to break the pattern or wearing them down. 

This is basically the same as it was in the original game, but it works better for some reason in this sequel. I don't know if they tweaked the little cogs in the system, tutorialized things better, or slightly altered animations or whatever, but everything just clicked this time [I didn't have a more organic way of weaving this little bit into the review, so I'm sticking it here: the same can be said about minigames like lockpicking. No clue what the difference is, but I was only able to unlock one chest one time in the original, and here I was unlocking chests willy-nilly]. It still isn't "simple," as you can still get overwhelmed easily if you aren't being smart, but it's still tremendously less tricky than in the first title. This is especially true if you use swords as your weapon, since you can learn an uber-overpowered sword technique from a trainer pretty much right out of the gate. I opted for heavy weapons myself, which don't come with such a technique...but even so, I didn't end up having too much trouble. Of course, all of that is for melee weapons, but you can also use bows, crossbows, and laughably unwieldy early pistols. Those will only do you any good for maybe one shot a piece in most combat scenarios, however, so I wouldn't put too much stock into them. 

Whatever your weapon of choice, the most important aspect of combat is stamina management. Stamina allows you to swing your weapon, block/parry/riposte, dodge, and it also allows your armor to soak up more of the damage you take (from what I can tell). Your stamina bar is about as long as your health bar at any given moment. This means that as you take damage, you have less overall stamina to fight back. That might sound like an instant death sentence, but I can't count the number of times I've managed to win combat scenarios where I took one too many hits with little difficulty towards the end. It's all about how well you utilize however much stamina you have. 

But combat is only one aspect of the gameplay experience in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. This is a massive RPG, meaning there are several other skills to hone besides those involved in killing. Firstly, there are overall stats like strength and agility, but those are pretty self-explanatory, so I won't be going over those. As for what's left over, you have things like stealth, lockpicking/pickpocketing, persuasion, alchemy, blacksmithing, etc. These, like overall stats, are pretty self-explanatory, but they tend to feed into the game's many open world systems a bit more. Obviously if you're good at the thievery skills, you'll be able to rob people or sneak around where you shouldn't be a lot easier (which, believe me, is something you'll have no choice but to do...so you might as well be good at it). Obviously if you're good at persuasion, you can get through certain quests and side things a lot easier or talk yourself out of punishment if you're caught committing a crime. But let's say, for example, that you're good at one but not the other. You're a master thief, but a terrible liar, in other words. If by some negative miracle you get caught in the act, you might end up trying to talk your way out of the stocks by saying there was a bee in your victim's pocket that you were trying to squash (this is an actual low-persuasion explanation attempt Henry can use). This, being a clear lie, won't work...and so you'll end up being punished despite your master thief stats. Now let's say the opposite is true: you're a giant bumbling idiot in plate armor who couldn't sneak your way out of a paper bag, but you've got a way with words. In such a case, you might murder someone in cold blood and then gaslight the guard who caught you into thinking they were actually the one who did it. I actually had a situation like this in my playthrough, just with trespassing instead of murder. At this point, I was in a forced stealth section without good clothes for the job, but my persuasion was pretty good. So, I got caught where I shouldn't have been, and I ended up talking my way out of it by connecting with the guard man-to-man. I talked about how I was just frustrated because I'd recently been played for a fool by a woman, got the guy laughing, and was left alone for a while because of our new camaraderie. Look up compilations of Henry's crime excuses on Youtube, I guarantee you won't be disappointed!

On the subject of persuasion, there are other systems at play in this world besides those of hard stat totals. There are a couple of different persuasion types: basic persuasion, buttering people up, intimidating people, etc, and Henry's current "state" adds a bit of weight to certain types of persuasion. If Henry is dressed up in fine regalia, for instance, then he appears more like a noble and thus his word is more likely to be taken at face value. On the other hand, if he's fresh off of the battlefield in armor and coated in blood, intimidation will be a lot more effective. There's no surefire way of winning a speech check no matter what your soft or hard stats are, so it's a matter of judging yourself, your target, and your circumstances to get what you want. Adding onto this is the reputation system. If you're caught committing crimes, people all over the county are going to hear about it. If you weren't caught stealing something but you end up wearing a stolen item on your person out in public, people are going to recognize it as that thing that went missing, and then the whole county is going to hear about it. If you're the best person around and you take every chance you can to help the needy, say it with me: everyone in the county is going to hear about it. So, word spreads oddly quick in ole' Bohemia, and whatever kind of word that is directly influences people's natural disposition towards you. I may have ended up a master thief by the end of the game (believe me, one forced stealth section is enough to make a believer out of you), but I kept my nose clean, so I had a great reputation wherever I went. Guards would call out to me in the street to wish me a pleasant day since I was such a polite person. In times where I'd accidentally commit a crime (trespassing charges come in pretty fast), my speech checks always succeeded because I had such a great reputation. This is but one of many facets of this world that rears its head in moment-to-moment gameplay, so I'd encourage you to head out and get this game to see more for yourself!

To move back to skills before continuing, I'd like to discuss the more utilitarian skills: alchemy and blacksmithing. These skills are among the most analog things you'll do in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, but they're also some of the most rewarding in my book. 

By blacksmithing, you can get good enough to forge weapons of higher quality than you'd normally find (and at only the cost of the materials). You can also forge lesser quality good to sell or exchange for components for higher quality gear. The process goes like this: you'll go up to a forge, select what you want to make, and get started. You'll start by heating up your raw piece of metal until it glows yellow, you'll move it to the anvil, you'll hammer up and down the metal (being careful to hammer evenly and with a consistent rhythm), you'll turn the metal around and hammer some more, you'll move the metal back to the fire if it gets too cool, and so on and so forth. You'll do this until the work is done, with higher-quality items obviously taking longer to do. There are no shortcuts here, so any time you want to forge anything, you'll have to go through this minigame. Some might not be a big fan, but I personally found it beyond rewarding to create my own gear in this way.

By engaging in alchemy, you can brew yourself potions for just about any occasion or poisons for your arrows. This comes in especially handy considering that this game, like the original, relies on a special saving potion in order to save in any other way besides exiting out of the game. Like the blacksmithing, alchemy is a step-by-step process, but there's a lot more variability. You'll assemble whatever medley of herbs are required and follow instructions out of your potion book. Some recipes will require wine as a base, others will require oil, others will require something else. Some recipes will call for an ingredient to be ground in a mortar. Some recipes will call for boiling to be done over two turns of the sandglass, while others will call for only one. The list goes on and on, and you'll have to either keep going back to your book or memorize the process. Like with the blacksmithing, this probably sounds tedious to some, but I have to say I enjoyed the process. 

Now, with gameplay ultimately discussed in a condensed, bastardized kind of way, we come to one of the game's negatives: mission design. Critics have made plenty of (positive) comparisons between this game and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and sadly the moment-to-moment mission designs are one of those points that isn't quite as positive. There's an awful lot of "go to the giant yellow highlighted area on the map and look for the teeny tiny spot where the thing you're looking for is" quests, which are literally never fun. They're especially not fun here because it seems like that highlighted area never shrinks when you get extra clues as to where a thing is or if you find a set of tracks or whatever. So if you end up getting turned around in a sudden combat encounter, you'll likely find yourself having to blindly traipse around looking for something that looks familiar in order to get back on the path. What's more, some of these highlighted areas are unhelpfully placed. In one quest, my only clue was that the thing I was looking for was in the privy. So, I went around the castle this quest took place in and looked in every privy I could find, to no avail. Lo and behold, the highlighted area ever-so-slightly contained a sliver of the outside of the castle...and that's where I found what I was looking for. It becomes more than a little frustrating at times.

Beyond this, there are also quite a few forced stealth missions, as I've already implied. What's truly astounding about these is the fact that they seem to get easier with each one...which probably sounds obvious given that your stealth skill will be increasing with these quests, but that's not what I mean. The first forced stealth segment (try saying that 5 times fast) is the only one where you're forced to do it in broad daylight with no alternate clothing choices. Each of these quests from there on can be tackled at night, and you have your whole array of clothing options to optimize your stealth stats. So, not only are you going to be taking on this quest while your stealth is at the lowest it's likely to be, but you have no way of turning the tides in your favor! The only thing that saves this quest is the palpable tension in the air. The context is that you have until the tolling of the 12th bell to complete your objective (in one of those yellow-highlight areas, no less) or else something terrible happens...so you have this ominous reminder of your time remaining every so often as the first bell rings, then the second, then the third, and so on. I don't know why they decided to go with the most difficult forced stealth quest first, but it wasn't a great choice.

Finally, there's the objective that kicks off the final mission. As far as I can tell, this was fixed in the recent upwards-of-30-GB patch, but because of this particular mission, I almost didn't finish the game. It's quite simple: you need to chase a dude on your horse. Only problem is (until recently) the horse you're given as part of the story isn't fast enough. Even after following Angry Joe's advice and offloading all of the stuff from my horse's storage to make him lighter, it wasn't cutting it. What's more, there was never any sense of how far away the guy had to get before I'd "lost" him. So, that nearly ended my playthrough right at the finish line...but the evening of that aforementioned patch, I easily completed the objective on my first try. Just a thing to be aware of in case I just got insanely lucky. And maybe you should pick up a faster horse at some point...

Finally finally, it isn't "poor design" per-se, but can we please stop with the "hey...instead of going to bed, let's get hammered and get up to hijinks!" quests? It was the worst quest in The Witcher 3, and it's definitely a low point here every tine it comes up (yes, it's multiple missions).

While on the subject of aspects of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II that aren't great, let's discuss the game's technical state. I'll do negatives first so we can end off on a high note. By far the most pervasively prominent problem I've been personally prone to purport is consistent animation and visual glitches. These mainly take place in cutscenes, with the most common issue being a strobe light effect from somewhere. Character models will also be in entirely the wrong place at times, and in some cases dialogue for certain characters will just disappear entirely. The camera will also occasionally choose to stand right up against a character or point the wrong way for a second or two. These don't really affect gameplay, but in a game as clearly about immersion as this one, it's a problem.

And this isn't helped along by the fact that there are bugs that affect gameplay. Well, quests, mainly. For example, there's a quest having to do with demons around mid-way through the plot. You're given a warning that after a certain main quest is completed, this side quest will disappear. So, I went out to finish the quest...only to find that a door I needed to open in order to do the last objective was bugged and couldn't be opened. I waited until morning, I approached the door from different angles, I tried to wait until the person inside that room left so I could go past him through the door, but I could never catch him in the act. After looking it up in a youtube video, I realized that this quest was well and truly bugged for me. 

Another example would be a main story quest where stealth wasn't required, but strongly encouraged. My objective was to sneakily take out all the guards in a courtyard and lower a gate while my compatriots handled a different one. I failed at this twice, and from the third time onward, the guards were instantly alerted from the second I loaded in. It didn't matter what I did, stealth was now no longer an option....and I wanted to do this quest stealthily. But here's the kicker. After royally failing the point of this objective, I got the achievement for completing this specific quest without ever being seen. Not exactly the most earth-shattering problem in the world, but it does speak volumes about the kinds of problems you're likely to have.

But on to positives! For starters, I never had any hard or soft crashes...and in a game where saving is dependent on single-use items, that's incredibly important! Furthermore, I never had any low textures or pop-in during my time. The graphics are some of the best I've ever seen (if not outright the best, in spite of character models not being anything to write home about), and the audio design while out in the world is matched only by Red Dead Redemption 2. It's safe to say that everything other than some broken quests and cutscenes is second to none!

As always tends to be the case when I review high-profile games like this, I find it hard to believe that you, dear reader, haven't yet heard of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. But I'd put some money on you not yet knowing if it'll be up your alley! With such tremendous word of mouth, folks might be tempted to give this game a shot, but with that positive word of mouth also comes rumors of its overly analog nature and the frustrations that can bring. So, I'll say this: give it a shot. Like Red Dead Redemption 2, this is a game you need to meet on its own terms to enjoy, but if you're willing to meet it there, I daresay you won't have experienced anything like it. If you're like me and you want to be completely immersed in a historical period, you're going to love this. If you're a fan of RPGs, you aren't going to feel burned like you did with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Hell, I wouldn't even call myself an RPG fan anymore, but this one was something special. So I'll reiterate what I said a couple lines up: give it a shot. The final couple of hours alone are worth the money, but they happen to come with the best RPG to release since Baldur's Gate 3. 

Let us review:

Poor quest design - 1.0

Technical woes - 0.5

The final score for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is...

8.5/10 - Near Fantastic

Fantastic work, Warhorse Studios, fantastic work!