After an extremely successful Kickstarter it’s time to see if the ambitious medieval, open-world game delivers on its promises. Thankfully that answer is yes, but it seems that someone left some food on the floor because the house has become infested with bugs.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
Developer: Warhorse Studios
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Kingdom Come: Deliverance opens up with a civil war brewing in Bohemia, located in the Czech Republic. Emperor Charles IV has died and his son King Wenceslas is a bit of a shmuck so Sigismund, the king of Hungary, has decided to stroll by and take over. His army happens to make a pitstop at your village and burns it to the ground leaving you, Henry, as one of the few survivors. What’s probably my favorite aspect of the plot is how it’s not a “save the world” sort of scenario. Henry’s just a simple blacksmith’s son and recognizes this but still tries to help in any way he can. He’s a bit of a dweeb, but is so earnest in his nature that it’s quite a bit of fresh air compared to most games where the protagonist is this chosen hero here to save the kingdom. This is ultimately a tale of revenge and simply surviving while these larger events play out around you.
As a bit of a history nut, I was concerned the game might lean too hard into Wikipedia dumps of historical exposition, and don’t get it twisted characters will drop them on you at a moment’s notice, but the world and characters are engaging enough to make you want to power through the initial wave of exposition. The writing is also incredibly well done and, along with some great voice acting from most of the cast, really helps give you a sense of characters right away. There’s also something incredibly refreshing about playing an open-world medieval game that’s grounded in historical accuracy. There are no trolls to fight and no warlocks flinging fireballs, just you and the regular people trying to live their lives. You’d think the removal of the fantasy element would dull the world, but it does the exact opposite and honestly wouldn’t work as well as it does if it wasn’t because of how well written most of the dialogue is. The only thing that really hampers the writing is that the facial animations jump erratically from uncanny to nonexistent. It can make somber moments fall flat or dramatic reveals come off as comical. The world also isn’t the largest around, which is something I felt conflicted with at first, but I came to realize that it’s better to have a smaller world where you always run into interesting things than a big one full of empty caves to explore. My only gripe with the world design is that some areas feel almost linear in that there are bushes or hills blocking your path with invisible barriers because the developers clearly want you to go through a specific path. When you’re trying to sneak into an area but can’t because of a wall of bushes placed there to clearly stop you from sneaking in from that direction, it kind of spits in the face of the entire point behind a game being an “open-world”.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance since its reveal has been touting a realistic combat system that’s unlike anything out there today and I really can’t think of another game that does it like they do here. When you get into a fight with an enemy a star shaped crosshair will appear with each point on the star corresponding to a direction you can hold your weapon. Move the mouse up and Henry will raise his sword, move it to the bottom left and he’ll move the sword accordingly. It’s a system that initially takes some getting used to because most games, even the ones that have a more “hardcore” combat system still have you moving the camera with your mouse/analog stick but here the camera stays locked on your opponent which allows you to focus on the movement of your sword since the camera becomes a non issue. With the camera locked steady and pointed straight ahead it makes it incredibly easy to focus on the direction your opponent is attacking from while also adjusting your own weapon which is important if you want to survive in this game. Combat feels appropriately heavy and gritty with each fight being a thrilling back and forth that reminds me of Prince of Persia’s (2008) “every enemy is a boss” methodology. You can even perform maneuvers like feints or fall victim to them yourself. Carefully watching your opponent’s moves and dodging at the right moment to deliver a brutal combo just feels supremely satisfying in a way I haven’t felt in a first-person melee combat game since Dark Messiah. The only time the fun grinds to a halt is whenever three or more enemies show up to rumble. Normally in the open-world you can (and should) run away but during certain story quests it’s a bit harder to do that which can lead to the timeless strategy of kiting your opponents which just isn’t fun.
As exhilarating as the combat is, something the game oddly does is lock key combat abilities behind a side-quest. You can go through the main questline and not unlock the ability to perform something as simple as a parry. It isn’t until you go to a specific character and ask for some training will you acquire these abilities. I got a feel for the combat by the time I met this character, so I never bothered to ask him for any training since I figured I’d learn new things through the main story path; it wasn’t until I was a few hours without being able to perform some basic maneuvers that I realized my mistake. Sure, you could argue that Henry obviously wouldn’t know how to do any of this stuff without a teacher to explain it which feeds into the “realism” narrative the game pushes, but that doesn’t excuse practically hiding key combat mechanics behind an optional quest. A smarter way to do this would have been to nudge the player to undertake the training side-quest by maybe having a character mention how Henry could learn some critical combat skills by training with this quest giver.
Adding onto the “realism” the game likes to throw around, there are a variety of elements you need to keep track of to keep Henry in tiptop shape. The most obvious is the hunger meter which will cause negative effects if allowed to go too low and even some mildly bad ones if you eat too much. Food is generally found all over the world whether you purchase it at a grocer or relieve it from an NPC because it’s not like they’re using it. But some items are perishable which means you also have to keep track of how good something is to eat before it goes bad or else risk falling ill to food poisoning which I can tell you isn’t fun when you’re in the middle of nowhere. You also have to make sure to stay regularly rested and the quality of the bed you sleep in will determine how well rested you’ll be. Those are the major stats to keep track of, but there are a multitude of symptoms Henry can encounter that are all helpfully explained in a buffs/debuffs page. This even extends to things like keeping clean since bathing and cleaning your armor will change the way people react to you and you can actually hear yourself get louder the more clanky armor you put on. I generally tend to stay away from “survival” games with these sorts of elements because I’m not a fan of having to juggle this kind of stuff but things like hunger aren’t that hard to deal with in Kingdom Come: Deliverance and just adds to the immersion.
Being an RPG, it would be safe to assume that there are stats to increase and if you assumed that then your assumption would be correct. The game takes cue from games like Skyrim where performing a specific skill will simply make it better the more you perform it which is really one of my favorite trends in newer RPGs. If you want to get better at thieving you simply need to pickpocket or lockpick more or get into more fights if you want your strength or sword fighting to go up. Each skill has a max level you can hit and are given points to invest in skill specific abilities at certain level intervals. Most of these skills simply make you better at doing the thing you’re doing, or unlocking combos for weapons, but many of them offer perks at the cost of negative side effects. You also won’t be able to unlock everything which means planning what you want to invest your points in is a must.
Not many people know, but there’s a town in Bohemia called Janky Town. It’s a magical place where clothing clips through you and you can spawn inside of an NPC. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a buggy game which is honestly to be expected from any sort of open-world game; you just can’t build something this big without having a few holes in it. I haven’t experienced anything particularly game breaking but besides the previously mentioned items I did see things likes Henry not being able to walk up certain stairs, dead bodies going into T-poses, animals floating their way over fences and basically anything you likely experienced in a similar game like Skyrim. Like I said, I didn’t experience anything that was particularly game breaking, but getting stuck on geometry during a fight isn’t exactly a good feeling to have.
Now my major gripe with this game is its archaic save system. To save your game you’ll need to sleep in a bed but it can’t be any bed, it has to be your bed or one you pay for at an inn. There’s also an item in the game called Savior Schnapps which is an alcoholic beverage you can consume to manually save your game when away from your bed but these items are limited and not cheap. I’m fine with all the elements of realism like eating and the difficult combat, but this is where it takes a running start and jumps clear over the line of tolerance. Some people just don’t have the time to deal with this sort of restrictive system and it can be especially frustrating if you die because of a bug. Losing nearly an hour of progress because the fast travel system decided to take me straight into a bandit camp and spawned me in the middle of four goons who were immediately wailing on me while I was still loading in with no chance of escape just isn’t fun. This is the one feature of the game that I’d appreciate them adding an option to allow you to toggle this “realistic” saving system for a more traditional manual save. Since its announcement people have been saying how the combat is the thing that will deter the less “hardcore” players but that’s not true at all, it’s this garbage save system. Thankfully, bless the PC community, there’s already a mod out there that allows you to save wherever that works wonderfully.
The Final Word
Despite an abundance of bugs and some minor quibbles, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a fantastic game whose issues can unfortunately be made even worse from a frustratingly atrocious save system.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
