Some days I’ve moped about how I’ll never get back the feeling I had the first time I played Skyrim. And then Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 arrived on a mighty steed to sweep me off my feet at full gallop. Armed with excellent, skill-focused melee combat and a rousing, action-packed medieval saga fit for a Hollywood blockbuster, it’s one part sequel and one part coronation, bringing a lot of the original’s ideas to fruition in the same way The Witcher 3 did for CD Projekt Red or Greedfall did for Spiders. No game of this scope and scale is without some technical scuff, of course, and its competing design goals are occasionally at war with themselves just as much as our hero Henry is internally. But even still, its majesty is hard to deny.
This tragic tale picks up almost immediately where Kingdom Come: Deliverance left off back in 2018, though I don’t necessarily think you need to have played the first one to get up to speed thanks to the main plot being relatively easy to follow and most of the callbacks being well explained as they happen. Henry, a blacksmith’s son turned unlikely warrior, is thrown into the middle of dynastic politicking and bloodshed played out by a diverse and complex cast, including your boisterous failson of a liege lord and some truly memorable entrances from real historical figures I don’t want to spoil.
What we said about Kingdom Come: Deliverance
There’s a shining suit of mail underneath Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s authentically medieval grime. Strong characters and storytelling, one of my favorite first-person melee combat systems ever, and special attention given to building moment-to-moment immersion come together as a mighty alloy that ranks among the most unique, memorable RPGs I’ve played in years. While a lack of technical polish occasionally caused me a good deal of frustration having to replay areas due to a bug or poorly-communicated quest objective, it’s the kind of adventure I didn’t hate replaying. – Leana Hafer, February 16, 2018.
Score: 8
Read the full Kingdom Come: Deliverance review.
The star that shines brightest across this expanse of countryside, though, is the city of Kuttenberg. I can’t speak about this place in any terms less flattering than to say it might be one of the wonders of the modern RPG world. I don’t think I’ve ever walked the streets of a virtual medieval city that feels this huge, detailed, and most importantly, alive.
The layout is based largely on the actual town that still stands today, with parts of it following the modern street grid almost exactly. It’s a wonderful place to simply wander around and discover all kinds of urban adventures – from resolving a dispute between two rival sword schools to hunting down a grisly serial killer. Yes, some of the NPCs obviously share the same voice actor and others share the same face – even important side characters, which can be particularly jarring. But it’s hard to get too hung up on that in a place like this. When I first arrived here I was already more than 40 hours into my 120-hour journey, and I spent multiple in-game days gleefully shopping for the sickest duds and best armor I could afford. And that’s what arriving in a huge regional capital should make me want to do!
There are around 100 quests, and practically every one was memorable.
The quest variety is what impressed me most of all, and that extends beyond just Kuttenburg. Very rarely are you simply sent to kill some bandits or carry a package to the next town – at least without some kind of interesting twist, moment of emotional turmoil, or decision built in. There are around 100 quests in total and, having done nearly all of them, practically every single one was memorable enough that it would stand out as a highlight in a lesser RPG.
Admittedly, some were slightly better in concept than execution. There was one I stumbled onto completely by accident that took me deep underground and turned my sword-swinging adventure into a horror movie, but ended up being far too short for the dread to really set in. All the same, I never felt like doing side quests ever became a chore, because I knew each one would be its own little complete episode of The Adventures of Henry, stuffed with quality writing and unique objectives. It’s a testament to how consistently strong they were that 120 hours did not feel way too long to me.
Along the way are expansive, breathtakingly beautiful landscapes spread over two open-world maps, both of which are chock full of meticulously researched details of late medieval Bohemian life. There isn’t a ton of variety in terms of geography – it’s all wooded hills and meadows, for the most part. But that’s what the region looks like in real life. It’s big enough to get lost in, and the contrast between villages and open wilderness varies things up nicely enough. I did find it odd that you can’t go into most of the churches, though, since those would be near the top of my list if I were planning a tourist trip through 1400s Europe.
If the side quests are like episodes of a TV show, the main quest is a big-screen war movie that pulls out all the stops in its ambition, dialogue, and emotional range. Parts of it made me cheer. Parts of it actually brought me to tears. And Henry’s ultimate nemesis got under my skin in a way video game bad guys rarely do, making me rethink everything I’d done up to that point in what might be one of the most memorable final encounters I’ve ever played through. It’s mature without being edgy, it drips with historical authenticity, and it has interesting questions to ask you about what it means to be a hero or a villain.
The main quest is like a big-screen war movie that pulls out all the stops.
It’s somewhat unfortunate, then, that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is both a mostly linear medieval action-drama and an open-world sandbox, and those two concepts don’t always play well together. I’m going to skirt around spoilers the best I can, but I need to give a specific example of the worst experience I had. I need to tell you about the Hungarian Camp.
In one of the late-game areas, there is a military camp set up by King Sigismund, the evil conquering bastard you’ve been opposing since the first hour of the first game. I, of course, tried to assault it by myself the second I got there, and was immediately put down like a dog. Fair enough. But for the next 40 hours of adventuring, I was plotting my revenge. A fire was lit in me – motivation to become as much of a badass as possible. I studied with all of the best blademasters. I learned the way of the bow. I saved up for the best armor. I forged, by hand, the very best sword in Bohemia. Next time I showed up at that camp, things were going to be different.
So, near the end, I went back to the Hungarian Camp Rambo-style and I killed everyone there. Okay, not the cook or the tailor. And not Musa – Musa’s cool. But probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 armed men. This was an empowering and gleeful rush, with difficult combat that tested all of my skills like never before. A real highlight of the entire journey. And these are enemy soldiers, let me remind you! I don’t feel like this was an unpredictable or degenerate thing to do.
So it was a downer when, shortly after, I was asked to infiltrate this same camp as a spy, and Henry didn’t even so much as mention that he had completely desolated the place and had a bounty on his head so large that the authorities would skip fines and prison and straight-up execute you if you’re caught. This is a required story quest with no alternate path, so the ridiculous, frustrating solution was to sneak up on the unkillable quest NPCs several times to talk to them and start the next cutscene before that same NPC spotted me and went running to call the guards.
It also ruined my near-perfect reputation because I guess killing invading enemy soldiers was a crime the peasants Sigismund is actively oppressing couldn’t forgive, and everyone in every town ended up hating me. But this was a major outlier in what was otherwise a hugely engrossing, marathon-length playthrough.
Other than that one total debacle though, I truly adored almost every minute I spent with Henry and company. The tactical, skill-based sword combat is a sharp refinement of the already great system from the first game, though I felt like at higher levels, the balance of pure stats to player skill skewed too much in favor of the former. You could probably reach the credits without actually getting particularly good at the swordplay, which was certainly not the case in the first one. But it is cleaner, more varied, and smoother to play. Archery, in particular, has improved a lot.
There’s a blacksmithing minigame now, which I found a little bit clunky and unsatisfying, but it’s still great to be able to use a sword I made myself in combat. And alchemy has been made way more intuitive.
I also really like the new perk system, where every level up feels like it gives you multiple choices between meaningful bonuses. In the first one, a lot of perks honestly felt more like side-grades than upgrades. There was a perk that made it so sleeping outside was more restful, but sleeping in a bed, less so. The sequel’s version only has the upside, and not the drawback, which is important if I’m going to spend my hard-earned skill points on something rather than picking it as a character background at the beginning. And while there wasn’t a single quest as interesting or different as the monk arc from the original, getting to level up my scholarship and unlock new quest resolutions by destroying my enemies with facts and logic was also great.
Did I mention that it runs really well on my 4070 Ti, even at 4K and very high settings? I still can’t even run the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance at max settings on this same machine, and that game is seven years old at this point. So the optimization work that was done here deserves a shout. There are also plenty of bugs, but most of them are of the silly sort you screenshot to show your friends that you’d expect in an RPG with this much ambition. Only rarely did something actually disrupt my gameplay.
