by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Intro:
Vast, engrossing, sharply written, stunningly detailed and quite gorgeous at times, it’s the very opposite of the generic slop that passes for open world games these days.
The original Kingdom Come: Deliverance dropped in 2018, and was a fascinating if flawed attempt at making a player feel like a mud-spattered peasant in the Kingdom of Bohemia (now known as the Czech Republic) during the 15th Century. It was a bold experiment, absolutely chockers with great ideas and ambition, let down by some severe bugs and glitches and unnecessarily fiddly systems. Still, there was something about the damn thing that your humble word janitor kept coming back to. It was perilously close to greatness. Cut to today and the talented devs at Warhorse Studios have just dropped their second entry in the series and while there are still niggles and nitpicks, it’s a huge improvement on almost every level and a bloody engrossing RPG for those with the chutzpah to slog through the title’s more obtuse elements.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 puts you back in the worn boots of Henry of Skalitz, the son of a blacksmith who became a knight and is now acting as a bodyguard to Sir Hans Capon, helping the noble with taking a letter to Otto von Bergow. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, no. Before you can sit down and polish your sword, you and your fellows are set upon by bandits who kill every bastard except Henry and Hans. Penniless, sans letter and not even wearing a pressed pair of trousers, Henry must make his way in an unfamiliar land with danger all around, in an attempt to complete his mission and preferably keep his head firmly on his shoulders. Of course, in the harsh land of Bohemia, with war creeping inexorably onwards and bandits behind every corner, that might be easier said than done.
Like its predecessor, KC:D2 very much wants you to feel the weight of every decision. And not just the story-based decisions either, like everything you do. Go into a fight without a sharpened sword? You’re cactus. Go on a long walk without enough food? Shitmixed. Grab a handful of food without checking if it’s still good? Food poisoning and certain death without medical intervention. Don’t have enough coin for said medical invention? Well, you get the idea. Systems lay atop systems, a palimpsest of intricate, fiddly and often infuriating mechanics that demand your patience and attention in equal measure. The first hours of this game, after the fairly on-rails prologue, will probably have quite a few players running for the hills, or at least to an RPG that’s a little more forgiving.
However, once you get the hang of this unwieldy beast, the pleasures reveal themselves. Not since the heady days of Skyrim will you experience such an immersive, richly detailed world and while it lacks dragons and magic, this gritty slice of ye olde Bohemia is so well realised, so vividly written that it becomes compulsive. Will you be honourable when your belly is empty, or will you resort to crime to survive? Will you return that noble’s stolen goods or will you keep them for yourself? And when you have that bandit on his knees, will you show mercy or perhaps skewer them and flog their gear. These decisions, so shallow in other RPGs, become a matter of literal life and death in KC:D2 and it makes the overall experience feel like what Bethesda might be like if they weren’t so fond of resting on their laurels and refusing to innovate.
Not everything is mead and barn dances, mind you. Some of the systems straight up suck. Lockpicking for instance (particularly when using a controller) is one of the most frustrating, unintuitive and broken mechanics in recent memory. Like trying to do a yoga pose and juggle at the same time one handed, an absolute nightmare that had us basically avoiding all the quests that required thievery. The save system, too, is bizarre. There’s the auto save which is meant to occur at important moments, but if you’re just out and exploring, it never triggers. The manual save either requires you to drink Saviour Schnapps (a limited resource) or quit the game entirely. This is meant to reduce the instances of save scumming, but in reality, just makes save scumming more annoying. And in a game that does have its fair share or bugs and glitches? Not a good look. Please have a look at these systems, Warhorse. In other words, Czech yourself before you wreck yourself.
Those caveats aside, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a hell of a game. Vast, engrossing, sharply written, stunningly detailed and quite gorgeous at times, it’s the very opposite of the generic slop that passes for open world games these days. It certainly won’t be everyone, and the initial difficulty curve is probably a bit too steep for its own good, but for those unafraid of getting their hands dirty, KC:D2 is a fantastic historical RPG unlike anything you’ve played before.
