Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Review
A Peasant or a Nobleman?
by Jordan Helsley
reviewed on PC
Kingdom Comes Again
There's a moment at the outset of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 where it presents as a different game. Following the events of its predecessor, the story begins with a more capable Henry of a slightly higher status, on yet another quest that will hopefully bring him closer to getting his father's last sword. An early sparring match reveals his considerable increase in swordsmanship. Between reading lengthy tutorials, his skills increase even further across the board. He's not quite at power fantasy level, but he's come a long way from the boy who spent our first day together throwing dung at houses and completing chores. He is a squire now, and he has earned it. He spent several tedious days undercover in the Sasau Monastery, after all!
To borrow one of the game's many storytelling tropes: it was all a ruse. An abili-tease. Henry must have been as disappointed as I was when all of that was stripped away, but he never quite showed it. Before too long he's all but back where he started: skill deficient and performing the grunt work. Henry hit his head so hard that he forgot how to pick locks quietly, how to feint in combat, how to stealth kill. It's only discouraging because there was a clear road of advancement without having to go backwards, but here we are.
Attention and Detail
When you enter the Kingdom of Bohemia (again), it acts as the ultimate Middle Ages playground, for a man of a certain status. There are plenty of moments where the interactivity of the world is staggering. In trying to become the ultimate Medieval thief, my enemies were quick to remind me that the stench of the unbathed transcends the shadows. The merchant I visited refused to buy the sword I'd stolen because he saw it for what it was, but was okay with several pilfered, more generic items. Outside of the moments where logic breaks down, where open world jank takes over, Henry's impact on the small-scale world feels almost too natural. In that regard, starting from square one comes with its own charm. It allows the opportunity to make quick advancements based on the littlest things. Every step you take, under the right circumstances, is an opportunity. When overencumbered, if you're willing to take a game that's already glacially paced even slower, your strength increases. Having optional conversations, in a game with several tomes worth of conversations, makes Henry a better orator. When I needed to increase my lockpicking skill, I spent a night in town picking every lock I could find. I had to imagine the look of confusion on everyone's face in the morning, but the "practice makes perfect" advancement path is often a delight, albeit slow. It all adds up, but it gives the sense that Henry has never done anything in his life.
The world's insistence on adhering to its systems has its downsides, though, and it constantly acted in opposition to my personal play style. As an explorer, when I enter a new space I want to find its nuance, to discover the limits. I've also been conditioned by countless other games, and often in ways that are counter to what Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 expects or demands, and it revels in that disconnect, purposefully and otherwise. When Henry opens an unlocked door, and unknowingly enters an off-limits area, he's usually quickly shooed away; no harm, no foul. Occasionally, though, he stumbled into a restricted bedroom, right as the owner sets upon the same path, and the two of them enter this dance that ends with Henry getting arrested and fined because the NPC wouldn't move from the doorway. They seem to have a thing with doorways and using them to either forget what they were doing or body-blocking Henry from getting anything done. In another, more confusing act of defiance, the only cobbler I could find refused to let me spend my hard earned money on some foot protection because he was more interested in having a non-verbal conversation with any nearby NPC the moment I walked up. This happened for so many in-game hours that I had to knock out a nearby guard and take his. I just won't be going back to that place for a while.
Patience Is The Greatest Virtue
I started to think that the overarching theme of the game is that "Henry needs to learn his place." He's not important enough to buy shoes, to enter the baths, to get a fair shake from the law. It is also something that the player needs to be comfortable with, before setting out on a 100-hour journey filled with mundane tasks. It's nice that you can hammer away at the forge for a few hours to make some sellable swords, or do the same at an alchemy bench by reading recipes in cursive accompanied by instructional images that make IKEA furniture look as complex as a 4-piece kids puzzle, but you really have to find that level of realism exciting. The bathing requirement is similar, as is washing your clothes, sleeping in an owned or rented bed to save (outside of consumable items), or trying not to piss off the only merchant who sells soap and a shovel.
None of this is any surprise to veterans of the first game, but Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 simply refuses to let you take it at any sort of increased speed. There's a reason the most popular mods remove the save restrictions, eliminate the tedious animation of picking herbs, and keep you clean longer. Every system is designed to slow you down, to prevent you from becoming the badass knight you want to be. It hits home after about the third time all your gear is taken from you. Can't fight your way out of this one. Lockpicks would help here, if you had any. Guess you're going to have to talk your way into a few bucks to accomplish X, to get to Y, to ultimately Z. Fortunately, the game will often give you sufficient information to know exactly what to do. Unfortunately, not always. A lot of quests are not only layers of puzzles to unlock the ultimate clasp holding everything together, they end with some form of "search this area" directions, with not-entirely-reliable ways to narrow your scope. When you're done at least you're rewarded with plenty of other quests to manage. Rinse and repeat, just like your gambeson.
Combat might be the ultimate test of patience, but it is also the area where their finely-crafted realism breaks down the most. It has been improved, without question, but it's either punishing to the point where you might refuse to engage with it because failing would set you back to a save point several hours ago, or you've trained yourself up to an instant-kill button. The area in between represents Henry as some version of Batman without the ability to adequately counter attack. Enemies block a lot of attacks - most of them, even. Fights (the one-on-one engagements, at least) usually play out like an overlong tennis match: enemy attacks, you parry and counter-attack, they parry and counter-attack, et cetera. The directional aspect seems nice, at first, but it lacks the ability to allow you around defenses, and does not matter on defense, because you're inundated with "counter" prompts that are incredibly easy to pull off, even on enemies attacking from behind. Once again, my expectations are thrown aside. Given how quickly Henry succumbs to his wounds, and the hardcore nature of every other aspect, expectation says enemies are just as vulnerable, but it takes a lot of work, and failure, to get to that point. It just feels like another way for the game to exact a slow pace, even in action packed moments, and the generous parry was thrown in to avoid maddening levels of punishment.
Tall Tales
The glacial pace extends to the story, too. Any hopes of "mainlining" should be left in a chest. There's plenty that the game should be proud of, of course, and it has earned the right to show off what it does well, but the struggle is also the point. All of this toil is in service of preparing Henry to continue seeking revenge and trying to come out on the positive side of the brewing war. Like the first game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has strong characters, and uses them to effectively tell a story where comparatively little happens on the grand scale. It's why the side quests are (once again) so strong, they focus on interactions between Henry and myriad other people in this world in microscopic stories. They allow the writing, the choice-driven nature of your Henry, and pretty impressive acting to flex their muscles amid the harsh landscape of the sandbox at large. It is relatively easy to forgive the pacing issues of the narrative, or the long list of classic tropes the plot pulls from, because its entire existence is hammering home the philosophy that the present is what matters, and the future is yet to be written. That just may not make the best video game.
When everything is said and done there will be this sense of accomplishment. Whether you conquered one 100-hour RPG or two, Henry has earned it. And options for changing even the smallest details of that story on a second or third playthrough are multitudinous. Therein lies the charm of the entire package: everything feels like it matters. When wolves attacked me after a costly bathe and laundry, it mattered. Likewise when I said the wrong thing to a girl after a dance. Even the several hours I spent upgrading my lockpicking skill to open a chest I was sure had a quest item in it only to find complete garbage mattered. By the end, if there even truly is an end, the sum ends up greater than the individual parts. It's a confluence of three stories at once: yours, Henry's, and the gameplay's.
In many ways Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 strays so minimally from the path of its predecessor in both a positive and negative sense. In others, it effectively uses the existing blueprint to build on what went well. It is graphically improved, but that makes the visual shortcomings more glaring. It's more hardcore, but more tedious as a result. It has improved combat overall, but makes some confusing choices in that execution. As a simulation of life in the middle ages, and as a character-focused story, it excels as it flaunts those aspects. As a video game, the successes are fewer, and too often the mechanics and pacing get in the way of actually accomplishing something. If you're a player whose natural pace is steadier, you might be the Titanic bound for an iceberg. But if you enjoy a slow pace, if you are that iceberg, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 will reward your dedication in spades. The philosophy of the entire experience is represented well in its cozy moments, like walking through a forest at dusk, as the rain comes down and lightning occasionally lights up the landscape. If you can see that beauty, and appreciate it, you don't want to speed things up.
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7.9
fun score
Pros
Incredible gameplay systems work together to craft the world's characters and personal stories. It truly gives this sense of freedom in actions and exploration, and a wide branching tree of choices to allow for varied playthroughs.
Cons
Some of the game’s most realistic systems get in the way, classic “open-world jank” abounds, the broad story gets in its own way, and the overall pacing is very sluggish.
