Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Kingdom Come Deliverance is a game by Warhorse Studio's whom have never released anything before making this their first game. They're a relatively small studio, at first only having 60 or so members, by the time the game was released around 150 people worked on it. The reason I was interested is that most RPG's take the super high fantasy route with goblins and magic spells and all that, but Kingdom Come is almost like a realistic simulation of what it was really like in medevial Europe. I saw a few clips of gameplay before I bought the game and the combat in particular looked really realistic, weighty, and gritty so I eventually picked it up on sale and sat down over the course of a few weeks and played through the long 60 hours it took me to reach end credits.

Before you start the game theres only two difficulties. Normal and hardcore. Of course I picked normal, but its interesting to note that Hardcore has a bunch of fundamental changes that make it really realistic and immersive such as not being able to see where you are on the map, no fast travels etc. There's no character creation, and the reason why is quickly apparent. As the game starts off, you find yourself playing Henry from the small village of Skalitz. You're the son of an accomplished Blacksmith, as the story goes, and the first few hours of the game sees you roaming about your home village doing menial tasks for your father, as a sort of long tutorial mission. The game is very story driven, there are tons of high quality cutscenes and even more dialogue scenes and tons of talking to NPC's. Theres this massive overarching narrative which follows the whole game that never escapes you, the game feels much more story driven and with a clear direction than most other RPG's I've played. At times it almost feels like a TV show or this giantic never-ending movie instead of a video game. There's so much talking to people, sometimes you can just spend 20 minutes talking to the same guy. The game has a heavy historical religious context, with everyone you interact with constantly talking of Jesus Christ and Christianity, its really fascinating in terms of the historical aspect, the way of life of people back then, and learning how people thought and behaved back then, they did a great job with the immersing the player into that mindset and way of life, what it was like to be born in the world back in those days. Of course everything is voice acted, and for the most part the actual writing and voice scenes are interesting, mostly in part because the main player Henry is just a likable guy whos evolution is fascinating to watch play out. Of course at the beginning of the game you're just a lowly peasent and you suck at everything. The game has a plethora of skills and abilities and stats because its a true in depth RPG: core stats like Strength, Agility, Vitality, etc, skills like Lockpicking, Thieving, Stealth, Drinking, Alchemy, Reading,  combat skills like Warfare, Defense, Mace, Swords, Bow etc...and at the beginning of the game you suck at all of it!  The game is very immersive in building that power fantasy of starting from nothing ,to becoming a presteiged  knight. Zero to hero. Because at the start of the game, it basically is way harder than the middle or ending of the game, its one of those kinds of games that is hard in the beginning and easy as you level up all your stats.

So tied into the heavy story narrative is this fact, that since youre just a lowly peasent blacksmiths son, it makes sense that you will suck at combat abilities and most other skills. The way you level up your abilities is by simply using them. If you want better lock picking, you have to lockpick easy chests. If you want better combat, you have to just do combat over and over or train with people in an arena. Stuff like that. As the game progresses the narrative never gets dull or boring, for as much story the game has its always pretty fascinating with entertaining supporting cast and characters. Henry's home village of Skalitz gets raided and destroyed by some unknown army for an unknown reason, then you find yourself getting taken in by nobility in some castle, eventually you find yourself working for various Lords and taken under one of their wing, Sir Radzig. The voice acting and writing for the characters are for the most part great and entertaining. The main cast of characters you keep interacting with such as Radzig, Hans Capon, Sir Robart the main man who teaches you combat and training,Divish,  Hanush, even the drunk partying priest you end up doing a few quests with, the writing is believable and you get to care about the characters and are interested in what happens to them. Even the villians and antagonists are well written and interesting, this guy called Toth whom stole your fathers sword, is cunning, maniacal, witty, and is a great adversary you find yourself pitted against as the story progresses. So while the game is very story focused, the story is well executed and I found myself invested in most of the characters and excited to uncover more and more of the story.

Though, thats not to say that it's this linear experience where you cant do what you want. No, it is an open world RPG with tons upon tons of side quests and other things to do. About 20 hours into the game I found myself enjoying it so much that I started completely ignoring the main quest because I didn't want the game to end too soon, and just started doing lots of side quests. That's not something I do very often in games, but here since the game felt so unique and I enjoyed the immersive realism and low-fantasy setting I just wanted to explore more and more of the world. A lot of the side quests are almost simply fetch quests, but many of them arent and involve many steps and twists and turns. For instance, one quest involves figuring out a mysterious death at a monastery construction site which has you playing almost a detective role interrogating people and trying to figure out how a brick fell and killed this guy.  You go through lots of steps and finally track down the murderer and confront him and it plays off in a satisfying manner. However, it is kind of weird that for many quests you literally get no reward at all, no gold, nothing. It's ok, I just wanted the experience of having more stuff to do and more stories to see.

Now, of course Kingdom Come isn't just a simple story game. It is a fairy complex in depth Action role playing game. You can kit your character out with tons of different armors and weapons. The inventory system is elaborately designed and looks pretty cool, you can equip armors in all sorts of different slots. Each piece of your body can not only equip armor on it, but also multiple layers upon layers like shirts and cloth underneath, then plate armor or chainmail above and so on. There are about a dozen or more different slots and armor combinations you can equip and the inventory screen even gives you a nice little visual display showing how you'll look. This in turn makes looting in the game very satisfying and exciting. Theres tons of loot to collect, and the whole game every step of the way I was constantly trying to find that next armor upgrade or weapon to play with. Since the game is trying to be realistic and immersive, its even more interesting because all of the equipment is period accurate and you can even learn things about history and how real combat and armour worked. For instance, the game has several categories of weapons, of course, like Short sword, Longsword, Axes, Maces - but the thing is, swords are mostly useless against heavily armoured foes. It just makes sense that a slash wont be able to do much against a guy wearing plate mail, so with this in mind, even the most expensive fancy sword wont be that effective against a lowly bandit wearing heavy plate armor. For this, you'll want to use a Mace as its pure blunt damage can do huge force of impact damage, knock them around, or even knock them out instantly. Its cool how the games combat realistically accounts for this and compels you to change up your tactic depending on what type of enemy you might expect to face in the future. Of course the game has stat systems for all of your armor, weapon damages, etc, and its simple enough to easily understand but not overly complex to where its just annoying to deal with, but beyond the mere stats of your armor and weapons pure player skill is almost more important, like knowing when to use Swords or maces, where to aim your swings such as if the enemy is wearing an open-face helmet to stab them in the face, when to use a shield or when to use a Longer sword for reach, things like that are just as important as merely looking at some stats.

And heres where it seems like the biggest frustration or confusion of the game can seemingly occur for a lot of players. I've read a few accounts of people saying the combat in this game is either awful or brilliant, or way too realistic and tough. It's almost all of these things and more. The combat is probably the most impactful, realistic, and 'clunky' out of all RPG combat games ive played. When I say clunky, I don't even mean it in a bad way. Just in the way that if you actually had to wear all this armor and try to swing around a sword or weapon it would be really clunky, and this game reflects this in a convincing and immersive way. The game is using CryEngine and it has a physics based combat system where you can swing your weapon in 5 different directions, its a very in depth, fluid, and visceral combat system. The clinking of the armor against swords or grappling each other when you get too close to bash the other guy with the back of your sword, its intense. It uses an automatic lock on system that acts as the core of the combat. For the first 10 or so hours, I had a real hard time wrapping my head around how the hell I'm suppose to win any fight in this game. But I just reminded myself that you're supposed to be shit at the combat in the beginning, and the game even offers you a training arena near the beginning of the game where you can constantly keep practising your combat skills, learning how it works, and even leveling up your stats which matters a huge amount. So I would keep practising the combat with that Captain Robard guy, getting level ups to my combat, and learning how to actually play. Its a unique system where at first it seems kind of bad and awkward, but once you know what to expect its a really satisfying and intense experience. The games mechanics can sometimes tend to be rough around the edges, like the fact of how Grappling works isnt well explained, or if it is explained in the in-game tutorials, it literally lies to you and explains its self wrong by saying "Get close to an eneemy and press Left trigger to grapple" -- You dont even need to press left trigger, you just walk into the enemy and tap the attack button once the grapple is initiated, then it seems like whoever has the highest Strength stat wins the clutch. So thats another thing that isnt explained, its not explained anywhere that certain mechanics are based on your stat levels, like winning grapples is determined by who has the highest Strength.  

When the game starts off, you lack a lot of the combat mechanics. After you train a bit, you learn the ability to perform something called a Perfect Block. This ability is pretty straight forward, a green shield appears in the middle of the screen for a brief second, and when you see it and press BLOCK, you perform a Perfect block which costs no stamina and is a great and satisfying defensive ability. Its a very small window of when the green shield shows up and you can block. Now, theres another ability you learn shortly after called Master Strike. Unfortunately, this one isnt very well explained in the game. I had to google search exactly what was going on with this thing cause I couldnt really make sense of it just from the in game details. But the general idea is, IMMEDIATELY (or just before) the green shield shows up letting you Perfect Block, if you block the instant you see the enemy performing a strike you can do a sort of parry, which combines the free no stamina cost Perfect Block - but also it does some parry damage or stun the enemy for free. So you get both a free stamina block, and a stun or damage on the enemy. It's a fun ability to perform, its very satisfying to pull off and makes the combat feel both skillful and addicting in a way, the rhythm timing, staring at your enemies hands or shoulders to see the exact moment he will be executing his move then you perform the Master strike, the combat is decently mechanically dense and overall fun to use so abilities like this make it all come together, it just sucks that it isnt very well explained in the game, even with multiple tutorials. You also learn the ability to do Combo's which is something like striking in a set pattern directions, but I actually never found it very useful because the enemies almost always interrupt your combo chain before you can even finish it with their own Master Strikes or Perfect Blocks. 

A great way I trained a lot of my combat abilities, and practised my skills, was the weekly Rattay Tournament. Once every game week, a quest will automatically engage telling you of a tournament in one of the main cities. Then you can go and pay a small fee to be put into the tournament where you engage in a series of rounds against multiple opponents. This also isnt explained well at first, the guy tells you its only 3 rounds, but what he means is - its the best 3 of 3. So 9 rounds total, really. But regardless its a lot of fun, not that hard, its a great way to level up your abilities, and you make lots of money and even every time you win the tournament you get rewarded with exclusive pieces of armor and equipment which made wanting to do the tournament even more appealing, I had lots of fun with that. One event in particular, after winning the tournament for the first time, and you defeat the champion, he gets so butthurt and salty that he sets up ambush for you outside of this village you frequent, hes a guy called Black Peter and he wants to kill you just because you won the tournament from him. Well, early in the game if you encounter this guy just fucking run and come back later. His weapon is poisoned, hes wearing plate armor, so I died like 50 times to this guy, reloading over and over trying to take him out. Finally I was able to by some stretch of luck but by god did they make this encounter punishing. It seems like he stays in that spot forever so you can just come back later and try to deal with him, but I really wanted his items so I kept painstakingly trying. Its the fact that he poisons you after 1 hit and you then rapidly die from poison damage which is mainly what made it so brutally challenging, but its a fun and memorable encounter anyway.

The game also leans even harder into the realism, atmosphere, and immersion with its many survival elements. You have to eat food, but not rotten food or you get food poisoning which really fucks you up. You have to sleep, but not sleep too long or it ruins all your Nourishment and makes you starve. You have to bandage yourself when bleeding, you have to make sure youre not dirty or people wont respect you as much. If you drink alcohol it has realistic long lasting consequences, its almost like 15 minutes in real time your character is bobbing around the screen.  You have to frequently repair your equipment because even after just one encounter, as it would in real life, your items get damaged from being beaten on. You can learn to repair them yourself, with the Maintenance skill, and Armorsmith and Repairsmith kits, which has a lot of useful perks built into it too. You can look at your character sheet of buffs and debuffs, and theres all sorts of realistic debuffs like after a combat encounter you might have a concussion or a Hangover, you can even eat too much if you go past 100% nourishment and you get a debuff for being bloated. It's a fun balance of trying to stay in the perfect match of all these things, and never really do the survival elements wear the game down or become a chore, its not over the top where you have to constantly micromanage, enemies are constantly dropping food items on them, and if youre sick of having to deal with it you can even opt into using perks which massively increase the time inbetween having to eat/sleep etc. One complaint I will say that while sleeping the damn clock ticks down so slowly, especially in the last hour for some reason!? Why does the last hour of sleeping take as much time as the first 7? I mean I guess thats realistic too, is it suppose to emulate the feeling of not wanting to get outta bed in the morning? I'm not sure if thats necessary.

More areas where the games mechanics can be rough around the edges is when youre faced with multiple enemies. As I wrote earlier, it forces a lock on system whenever combat is engaged. But if you find yourself ambushed by multiple enemies, say after the random encounters during Fast travel, then if you desperately try to run away the game just keeps snapping back to the enemies via auto lockon and it can be frustrating and just annoying and not make much sense. The only way to disengage the auto lockon is to Sprint but in the process the controls kinda become a jumbled mess. Yeah, it makes sense that realistically you cant effectively fight multiple enemies, and after you level up your stats enough its possible to reliably win encounters of 2-3 enemies, sometimes the actual experience of dealing with multiple enemies feels more like a controls/design blunder than a meaningful immersive encounter. It's also weird how for a lot of the campaign it keeps pitting the player in these massive warfare battlezones with dozens of enemies, where the player doesnt even really have to do anything but can almost just stand around and wait for the AI to kill eachother to progress, its like the game is first and foremost balanced and designed around 1v1 combat, but theres tons of segments, even forced main story segments, where youre in these massive battles and it feels a little unpolished or underdeveloped.  But overall, once I got the hang of it and leveled up my character, I was constantly seeking out battles and willingly engaging in open world combat encounters just because it felt so satisfying to play, the graphics and animations can tend to be incredible and very detailed, the enemies voice lines while fighting you can be hilarious and have real personality, so the overall combat experience is just really fun for the most part, especially when the looting is so enjoyable and its always fun to see what kind of items you can pick off the enemies corpse to sell later or use yourself.

Since the combat can be so ruthless and unforgiving at times, you can quickly find yourself in a situation where you thought everything was fine, but then you get swarmed by 5 enemy bandits and you cant sprint away and you die very quickly. Well the game is kind of unforgiving and unorthodox in its save system, so its not uncommon for me to randomly lose 20+ minutes of progress because I hadn't thought to save. The way saving works, is, you can only save by sleeping in beds, but not just any bed, it has to be a bed that specifically says 'Sleep and save' on the prompt. I never really figured out what determines what beds are Save beds vs regular beds, because seemingly at random there are beds around the world where you can save but others you cant. So you need to sleep for a minimum of 1 hour to save, or the game will sometimes automatically save during Quest progress, OR you can buy or craft a potion called Saviour Schnapps to do a manual save at any time. This save potion isn't too easy to come by, atleast for maybe the first half of the game, so I mostly ignored manual saving and instead just slept in as many Save beds as possible. But I still a few times definitely found myself frustrated and pissed off at suddenly losing 20 minutes of progress to a random bandit encounter I couldnt escape from. But overall I actually like the save system, I like that it forces the player to try to stick with his decisions and try to make everything more meaningful than the other typical RPG's where you just quicksave before every action, making those games feel a bit trivial. So I'm glad Kingdom Comes save system tried something different to alleviate that, I think it works for the most part and makes your actions have more weight to them than they otherwise would, and its worth the few frustrating instances of losing progress.


I played the game for 60 hours, and could have played for a lot more. Even at the end of this long playtime, I'm not bored of the game and could easily buy all the DLC and play those stories too, and come back and do the rest of the side quests. The graphics and open world landscape is among one of the most visually appealing and immersive games I've seen since basically ever, its a really lush countryside mixed with villages and castles, the world is pretty comfy to just live in it does feel like you can get sucked into it because the way everything is laid out is really believable. There are so many mechanics that I havn't mentioned, the speech system of course has many dialogue options for every single encounter, there are speech checks, theres intimidation options, theres Charisma options, even small things like having to frequently wash yourself in water basins or else people will comment youre filthy and wont respect you as much, if you wear more prestegious armor they'll comment that you're a prestegious Knight, etc, makes the world really fun to engage with thats one of the reasons I wanted to just stop the main quest and instead go do a bunch of side missions because the world is so well done. There are big main cities such as Rattay with lots of merchants and trainers who can instantly boost some of your stats, theres an in-depth horse riding system where you can buy horses and upgrade your horse, press Y at any time to whistle to call your horse who will reliably spawn around you, use that to ride around the open world, although I will note this too can be rough around the edges with constantly colliding into bushes or other clunky objects can interfere with your horse. I havn't even mentioned the Perks system which every single category of skills also has dozens of perks you can choose from when levelling, and theyre not necessarily even upgrades its like the perks have Pros & cons so it makes you think if you even want to get any, I thought that system was really fun to play with and made the whole leveling process exciting because It wasnt needlessly convoluted and complex but almost felt like it was optional if you even wanted any perks or not. A couple main complaints with the game is basically that it can be pretty buggy, probably because its not this huge AAA game but a relativiely smaller company developing it, it still is visually more impressive than most AAA games, but it can have a lot of bugs or required me to google some things during some quests to figure out if something was bugged or not, commonly it was. Another complaint is sometimes the quest marker will tell you to go somewhere, but thats not really where youre supposed to go, youre supposed to go above or below the place its showing you or take a completely different route to get there, just wasting tons of time fooling you, that sucked. Another complaint is this whole Monastary segment where you have to become a monk to infilitrate the monastary to kill some guy, that whole segment could have been done better because it has this whole daily schedule you have to follow and if you dont they keep throwing you in solitary confinement or resetting your items, it was more tedious than anything, while the concept was cool and it wasnt that bad, some things about that whole segment also felt buggy and underpolished too. The game kind of ended on a cliff hanger, which I guess was sort of disappointing but at the same time makes me hyped for a sequel so there's that.

I put the game off for a few months after buying it because I was hesitatnt if the game would be really daunting or if the combat would be too hard, but not really once you get past the first initial learning hump and understanding that its a Zero to hero kind of game, that the beginning has a steep learning curve and that it actually gets easier as you keep playing, the game is a brilliant experience and I'd almost dare to say one of the greatest RPG's I've played to date. It has all sorts of amazing small touches like even having this big codex detailing everything about medieval history, complete with paintings and drawings of medieval life about everything you discover in the game, I loved those artistic touches like that. The map as well looks brilliant with its hand-crafted painted aesthetic, they just really nailed a lot of aspects with the aesthetics, UI, and personality in this game, you can tell its a passion project with a lot of care and attention put into it and not just some corporate sell out game made to appeal to lowest common denominator, the devs really just made a game THEY wanted to see made, and it shows.

9/10