KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE 2
From: Warhorse Studios
For: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
★★★+
REVIEWED BY HAYDEN MEIKLE
This review is rather different from the one I would have written a week ago.
And, I suspect, it is different again from the one I would have written a week down the track had the boss generously extended my deadline.
Because here is the thing about Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, or at least my take: your feelings about this game might vary wildly depending on how much time you spend within it and the sort of experience you encounter.
It is not a game to be pigeonholed. Nor one that can be easily described or recommended. It can be fantastic and frustrating, it can delight and disappoint. One hour in it can be all sorts of fun, and the next can leave you wondering why you bother.
The truth is I do not really know if I love this game or if I will soon cast it aside to watch it gather dust for the rest of my gaming years.
An early confession is that I did not play the original, though I vividly recall my colleague Ben Allan describing it - for another publication - as a ‘‘medieval chore simulator’’.
So, I entered the KCD2 world not really knowing what to expect, but I did brush up on the story.
You play as Henry of Skalitz, a rather ordinary bloke on some sort of journey from the blacksmith’s forge to the court of kings.
The setting is early 15th-century Bohemia - what would become modern-day Czech Republic - and the background is a festering civil war after one king has been usurped and another has invaded the nation.
Henry is not exactly powerless but, in true action RPG style, your mission begins in challenging fashion as your clothes are raggedy, your sword pifflingly weak and your charisma barely strong enough to convince a tavern wench you deserve a cheap horn of ale.
Quickly, I discovered there was to be no quick fix to my eager wish to get Henry to be a god of all attributes.
Much of the early parts of the game are concerned with the frankly mundane as you seek employment to make a little coin, learn a trade like blacksmithing, tell your dog he is indeed a good boy, and try to make sure your basic requirements (sleep, nourishment, avoiding slaughter) are being met.
Me, well, I just seemed to keep running into trouble. I opened a door - and the inhabitants were singularly unimpressed. I jumped on a horse - and was instantly arrested. I looked at some bloke the wrong way - cue a beating.
Patience is very much required as you explore the sandbox environment and either follow the storyline or meander to see what is out there. And there is a lot: cute villages, mouthy peasants, dense forests, imposing holdfasts. There are also a lot of characters, and most seem determined to either make a wisecrack or engage you in conversation. Dialogue chains are constant and surprisingly deep, and non-playable characters react in vastly different ways depending on your answers. Indeed, they react if you look a bit dirty, if you walk with a certain swagger, or if you are still wearing those clothes you stole from the nearby village.
You will fail, lots, and you will see your reputation with people rise and fall, and you will not always understand why.
Then, of course, you will have to fight. And this will not be much fun - at least for a while. Until your abilities have levelled up and you have equipped some decent gear, combat will be cumbersome and often end in disappointment.
The central message here is you need patience to play KCD2. A few hundred hours also would not hurt.
There is a cracking storyline unfolding, and the choices you make really feel meaningful, and everything takes place in a delightful world, a recreation of the times that must have taken years of painstaking design work from tiny Czech studio Warhorse.
A couple of quibbles - the map is cute but not always the easiest to follow, and the inventory structure and pages of background lore can be intimidating.
But this is a game really like nothing else out there. More Bohemian adventures await.
