Verily, let us get the good news out of the way early. After many an hour playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, I would advise thee to remove yon blade from thy scabbard and cleave out much calendar space around February 4th. The 2018 original of this open-world medieval-fest was promising but buggy; the follow-up has pulled its socks and pantaloons up considerably to potentially be the earliest sleeper hit of 2025.
While showing The Bigs how it should be done, I believe that developer Warhorse Studios has spent its delay time well in the polishing department. Where once launch adoptees of this cult hit (myself included) were beset by iffy AI, stunted framerates, and worse, KCDII runs rather well. More importantly, it’s not difficult for newcomers to a leg over this new adventure and find themselves glued into the saddle in short order.
Recap time with a side order of first game spoilers! These are the continuing adventures of Henry from Skalitz, a low-born son of a blacksmith whose small village world gets burned and turned upside down. Cue: a revenge quest that puts him on the trail of the fiendish one-percenters responsible and a chance internship with Sir Hans Capon, loveable pompous playboy extraordinaire.
Without detailing too much, KCDII picks up on a road trip shared by these two unlikely friends as the hot-headed and foolhardy Hans plays emissary in a foreign land. You can pretty much guess how it goes, both from the fact that your liege lord is an impulsive git and the fact that the sequel needs an excuse to deprive you of your mithril-level armour, Excalibur stats sword, and a whole lot of perk/abilities knowledge.
Needless to say, I soon found myself on the dirt level of society with rag chic, bugger all Groschen to spend, and zero friends in high places. Sounds awful, but if you love a bit of video game-based adversity, then the Kingdom Come series does exactly what it says on the tin—it’s hardknocks heaven.
The Kingdom Come series does exactly what it says on the tin—it’s hardknocks heaven.
Once again, there’s the weirdly gratifying grind of inching up every skill you need via repeated use (as opposed to slapping points into a tree). If that sounds familiar to anybody who’s played a TESO game in the last two decades, that’s understandable. KCDII is more or less Bethesda’s formula minus any fantasy element, with extra steps and/or difficulty added to pretty much every in-game system.
Want to craft a sword or some armour? You’re not just strolling up and clicking your way into it inside of thirty seconds, you literal peasant. Find your way into landing a job with the local smith, meticulously find the many elements that make up a sword, and then spend a good ten minutes manually and skillfully belting your items out via a forge and anvil.
Oh, and don’t forget to spend more minutes sharpening your new attitude-adjusting implement on the grindstone. There’s a good servant to realism.
Want a health and/or save potion? You’re not just going to link some items in some menu, lowly serf! Get your raggedy arse to the alchemy table (after you’ve gone and picked the herbs out in some bandit-infested field) and shift between leafing through a physical recipe book, a shelf of ingredients, and various other apparatuses.
Do you require more evidence of this sequel sticking to brutal, make-the-player-slave-for-it IRL-isms? Well, how about combat, which will quickly deprive you of the notion that the average man can wade into a mob of people and carve through them like Conan on red cordial.
The designers at Warhorse have done their martial arts research. Trading steel with a single opponent is a positioning/footwork affair that’s all about angle of approach and stamina management. As before, you’ll need to use your right stick to preselect one of five swing vectors before you yank on R2. Probably more wisely, you’ll wait for your foe to make the first move, at which point you can quick-press a parry followed by a counter-strike (which may be met with exactly the same technique).
wade into a mob of people and carve through them like Conan on red cordial.
It’s more measured and definitely feels more streamlined in AI terms than last time, and I loved returning to it. Patience and clever judgement of how your victim is holding their stuff still pays dividends. Constantly shuffling sideways to keep multiple a-holes in a conga line, as opposed to ganking you from all sides? Also worth looking into.
I should also warn you that you ought to be in a fight for a very bloody good reason (other than testing out the new edge of your sword or to secure the most cost-effective way to dye your tunic red). It seems to me that the social systems of KCDII have been given a shot in the arm. Every NPC has intricate scripting that makes them a part of a complex ecosystem where info about ne’er-do-wells like yourself gets passed along more readily than the local strain of leprosy.
I gravitate to stealth and opportunistic purloining in these sorts of games. Believe you me—that is a problematic approach to a community of gossipy AI God botherers.
Even if I wasn’t caught red-handed in the act by some NPC who followed me because my reputation in the area was low, or I was out-and-out suspicious in my movements, people who I thought were far enough removed from the area of the crime recognised my ill-gotten equipment. Amusingly, the confrontation that follows offers some options depending on your specs—physical intimidation, charismatic pleading, bribery, or looking fancy enough to use class as a cudgel with an incredulous “Don’t you know who I am?!”
Expect to end up in the stocks. Expect to have your stuff confiscated. Depend on greatly damaging your hours-long facade of not being a shifty jerk who robs poorer people when he’s not picking peanuts out of poop.
being a shifty jerk who robs poorer people when he’s not picking peanuts out of poop.
When it comes to performance on the “full and complete” PS5 Pro code I was furnished with, KCDII isn’t perfect. That’s to be expected this far out from launch. To be perfectly honest, I was quite a bit impressed with the shape that it was in purely in terms of out-in-the-world framerate and NPC AI routines. The worst I’ve seen is the odd object pop-in during the intro section and maybe a brief frame hiccup when transitioning to/from one of the in-game cutscenes.
Compared to the hound’s breakfast that was the first game, that’s pretty surprising stuff.
Indeed, that’s the main feeling I had when I had to holster my sword and ride away from my preview time. There’s definitely a sense of more of the same to this sequel, but what’s old feels new again with some clever polishing here and there plus the power of current-gen graphics upgrades.
As I said from the onset, you need to raise your visor and keep a sharper eye on this sequel, even if you never made time for Kingdom Come: Deliverance in 2018 and feel somewhat intimidated by its obtuse nature and ongoing story. This buddy-knight tale will ease you into this world gently as it’s banging you around the bascinet with branching choices, consequences, and high-stakes combat.
If you’ve got the mustard to endure the masochism, I honestly think you could be rewarded with a cult-hit experience that’s been training hard in the off season and is about to go mainstream.
This preview was made possible by early code provided by Plaion AU with no strings attached beyond basic embargo terms.
