Played on an original release-day Xbox One. The Xbox version hasn’t caught up in terms of patches and fixes yet as Microsoft is still witholding them for review. For further details please see this steam community post by Warhorse Studios’ Community Manager. Keep in mind that many bugs or issues detailed in this review may already be solved by the time of reading.


Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s story actually begins about ten years ago, but it only really got moving four years ago in January 2014. The newly-founded Warhorse Studios started a kickstarter campaign to raise money for a new hyper-realistic medieval RPG set in their homeland of the Czech Republic (formerly Bohemia). Ultimately the kickstarter for the game raised $5 million and Warhorse put more than 70,000 man hours into their very first game.



Unfortunately I didn’t really learn of the game until late last year. After playing Skyrim, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and various other medieval RPGs for six years, I was in desperate need of a new RPG fix. One reddit post or comment later and Kingdom Come: Deliverance was my most anticipated game of early 2018.




Was the game ultimately worth all that time, effort and money, and would it ultimately be worth your time and money? Did 15th century peasants shit in wooden buckets?

Story, Writing, Quests and Acting



I’m just going to come out and say it, this is probably one of the best video game stories ever told. Warhorse co-founder, director and lead-writer Daniel Vávra shows his excellent talent for direction and writing from the opening scene to the end of the epilogue, this game had me invested in historical characters and the events they participated in more than any Assassin’s Creed game ever did. Our protagonist is Henry, the wimpy drunken layabout son of a blacksmith named Martin, and in many ways he’s one of the best video game protagonists out there because he serves as the perfect analog for the player.


Henry’s so terribly bored of everyday life around the forge, he wants to get out there and explore, he wants to learn to fight with a sword, his heels are itching and blood boiling, he wants to get the heck out there and slay bandits and hunt boar, he craves action and adventure! It’s actually pretty genius in the way Henry is depicted as it makes him extremely easy to sympathize with, and then when King Sigismund of Hungary attacks Henry’s hometown of Silver Skalitz with his army of Cumans and Tatars and kills his parents, it makes for an exceptionally compelling narrative that drives the player to want to help him succeed.


Most major and auxillary characters are excellently portrayed and written, especially Martin. Henry’s dad is just cool, charismatic and likable. He’s like the son of the most interesting man in the world and The Fonz, as a 15th century Bohemian blacksmith. Sir Radzig Kobyla is fantasically portrayed as well, charismatic and a great loosey-goosey laid back personality for someone of high nobility, it’s easy to like him. His response to ‘Halt! Who goes there?!’ is ‘Lucifer and all his minions! Who do you think?!’ and is one of my favorite lines ever simply due to its well-timed delivery.



Romance and courtship within the game is also believable and enjoyable. Henry will take a girl he likes out on a stroll by the river, or buy her a nice new dress, and they’ll sit and have lunch and talk about current events or their interests. Actually, most conversations in the game are very believable and natural, which speaks volumes not only for the many quality actors but also for the great writing and direction. This is a story that needs to be experienced!




That’s not to say there aren’t a few warts tarnishing the beauty. Minor villain character Zbyshek gets a fistful of manure thrown at his forehead. He then declares “FUCKER! You’ll pay for that!” in the most dull, uninterested and phoned in voice with lip-synching so bad it could give a 60s Japanese dub a run for its money.


I also felt as though the script blew its load a bit too early in regard to one of the main twists. Granted the twist could be guessed much earlier, but instead of having Radzig confirm the speculation early on, it would have had much more impact if the main villain revealed it to us in Vranik only.

The pacing can be a bit off at times as well, though I suspect that was more my fault than the writing given that some quests and their objectives were challenging enough that I had to redo them multiple times.


While on the subject of quests, Jesus Christ be praised this game has phenominal quest structure. Most main-line quests have varied and unique objectives, and are generally open-ended enough that you can complete them in any way you see fit.


For example the prologue tutorial has five objectives, such as collecting a debt from village drunk Kunesh, and picking up ale for your father at the tavern. You can get the ale first, but if you do it’ll go warm and flat and you’ll have to get another. You could try persuading Kunesh to pay his debt, or you could fight him for it, or break into his house and repossess the items he owes for. If you fight him, you can do it alone or enlist the help on Henry’s friends. If you want to persuade him, you might go to the tavern and get drunk to have a better chance. Simply one of five objectives in the tutorial can be completed in multiple different ways, ensuring your experience will be different from everyone else’s.

Another quest that stood out sees you infiltrating a Catholic monastery to kill a bandit hiding out among the novices there. You must infiltrate monk society and live the monastic life in order to stealth around the monastery and find clues as to who the right monk is. The quest is very reminiscent of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for PS2, which saw a lot of sneaking around Hogwarts at night and avoiding the prefects. It was definitely a lot of fun to play out!


Gameplay

Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s gameplay is definitely untested and refreshing compared to other RPGs today. Henry as a character is literally a pleb at the start of the game, so he’s terrible at literally everything. It’s a fantastic way to tie in character progression as you need to practice at various skills in order for both Henry and his player to get better at them.


If you’re hoping to customize your own character or choose a different gender, I’m sorry to say Kingdom Come doesn’t feature a character creation system. Most of the time this would be a deal breaker with me, but the game does feature various weapons and armor with a hefty armor layoring system, and Henry is adaptable to just about every playstyle imaginable with perks unlockable through leveling and progression.



For melee combat you slash your weapon with RT and stab with RB, and the direction of your attack is done by moving the right thumbstick. Blocking is done with the left bumper. It’s easy enough to get the hang of and it gets easier to control the more Henry as a character learns to fight. In order to unlock extra moves such as timed blocks, parries and combos, you need to learn them from a combat trainer like Captain Bernard. You can also unlock perks that unlock combos by leveling up, and other perks might buff your combat abilities while debuffing non-combat abilities. Perk choices have weight to them and I really like this system as it not only adds replayability but also makes you think and strategize about taking perks.


Archery is similar to almost any other RPG with a bow, hold down RT to aim, release to let go. Unlike other RPGs, there is no aiming reticule or crosshair here and at the start of the game Henry is weak in the arms, so his aim gets shaky the longer the arrow is drawn. Arrows also have weight to them, and certain arrows are better for ceratin situations. For example piercing arrows are good for taking down enemies in plate armor, while long-distance arrows are good for hitting enemies from far away. Hunting arrows are best for, you guessed it, hunting game.


Of course you can solve most quests without ever having to get into a fight. Stealth is another valid tacting, affected by how little your clothes weigh and how dark they are, as well as how fast you move. Taking up alchemy will let you brew poisons that you can apply to your weapons, or slip into an enemy camp’s food and wine reserves, or you can brew potions for charisma and speech that will let you talk your way through the game. You can knock people out from behind while in stealth, and once you reach level five stealth you can take a perk that lets you kill from behind in stealth as long as you have a dagger on you.


If you end up biting off more than you can chew, leveling up your horsemanship skill will allow you to make a hasty retreat. For breaking and entering you have lockpicking, which on a controller controls like a contortionist trying to play Twister while riding a unicycle. You must use the right thumbstick to find the sweet spot, and then you must turn both sticks at the same time to turn the lock all the way around. It’s incredibly fiddly but it’s possible to get used to it, though the controls should be better optimized.

For pickpocketing you hold down the A button to feel around in your victim’s purse and set your timer for how long you have until they notice you, then that opens up a Russian Roulette style radial menu with the timer around it where you must highlight a spot and click it to reveal what’s there, and then you need to press A again to take what you’ve revealed all before the timer runs out. In the game’s pickpocketing tutorial quest the most time I managed to get before being noticed was 8 seconds, which is in no way enough time given how unresponsive and fiddly the pickpocket interface is.


When it comes to alchemy, you find and pick ingredients in the game world. Then at an alchemical laboratory you must brew the potion you want yourself by following its recipe. Some recipes are long and involved, others simple and easy. You might need to grind up a specific amount of a herb, boil an amount for a specific period of time, or you might need to distill the potion to complete it. It’s a very fun and involved process that I enjoyed doing quite a bit.


When trying new equipment in your inventory your stats screen also appears. To compare what you’ve picked up with what you have equipped, the numbers on the stat screen will turn a bright cyan to show an increase, and a bright red to show a decrease. This applies to stat buffs as well.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance sees you traversing a game world consisting of sixteen square kilometers of the rural Bohemian countryside, consisting of many small towns and one decently-sized major city. The in-game map is hand-drawn and highly detailed, making it not only useful but a great treat to look at.


The open world is filled with things to do, from hidden treastures to find to random events encounterable on the road. You might stumble across a riddler who will bet you coin you can’t answer his riddle, or a feint-hearted knight who you can take pity on and convnce to return home or fight him for his gear. Fast travel sees you watching your marker travel across the map in real time, and occasionally you’ll have a chance to investigate or ignore a random event, but it’s ultimately slower and more boring than simply traveling on horseback.


The game saves at important quest moments, whenever you sleep in a bed you own, whenever you use the services at the bathouse, or when you drink a special alcoholic beverage called Savior Schnapps. The Schnapps may seem hard to come by at first, but apothecaries sell the ingredients in stacks of ten or more for cheap every day or so, the drink can be made from the start at an alchemy lab, and you can take perks to automatically brew the potion and/or brew an extra flask during each alchemy session. A save and exit functionality is being considered for the next patch.

There are mild survival elements in the game, Henry requires food and rest to properly function. Some might fear this mechanic would be too intrusive, but personally I felt as though it added to the experience. Hunger and sleep go down at a reasonable rate, which can also be affected by a few perks, so unless you’re waiting or fast traveling it rarely ever becomes a problem, and food cauldrons and beds to sleep in are littered throughout the game world.


Your clothes and armor will accumulate grime and become damaged over time as well. This requires you to bathe and repair your gear on occasion. Being dirty or covered in blood will affect the effectiveness of your speech skill, as will the condition of your gear. You won’t intimidate anyone with a rotten old wooden bludgeon, for example, and nobles might turn their nose up at you if you look like you just went diving in the latrine.


Something I didn’t enjoy was the impassable vegetation. At one point during the story I had to chase a german knight down on horseback. What should have been a thrilling chase ended as soon as it began because he cut through the woods and my horse kept getting stuck on small bushes, rocks and fallen logs. Refusing to be defeated by something that wasn’t my fault I ended up reloading the game to do the chase properly.

Some points in the game can feel annoyingly arbitrary as well. During the monastery infiltration quest, for example, you must keep to your daily schedule or face solitary confinement at the hands of the disciplinary Circators. You can befriend the Circators to have better speech skill with them, but even then they’ll only give you a pass once and they get on to you for not being where you should be even if you’re on your way to your appointed task, which got frustrating at times.


I also think the game could benefit from a New Game + mode, but I’m not upset that it isn’t there and I probably won’t shed any tears if it’s never implemented.



Performance, Presentation and Graphics



This is where the game starts to falter at some points. Cutscenes look fantastic, camera placement is near perfect and the game just looks so, so very pretty. It’s using the Cry Engine so beauty is to be expected, but it’s the game’s performance that delivers a nasty blow. Too often I found characters turning invisible in cutscenes, the map texture wouldn’t load in properly resulting in what looked more like a grimy bathroom stain on tan-colored drywall, my horse got stuck on fences and then started doing handstands, grass, trees and NPCs would pop in when I was right next to them.


I had my first game-breaking bug when doing the pickpocket tutorial with Miller Peshek. I failed too many times and the NPC teaching me got fed up and started to leave right as I tried again, so it counted as actual pickpocketing. He and his daughter ran to get the guards, but after hours of in game waiting no one came and Henry was tired and hungry. But the bed the game designated as mine wouldn’t let me sit or sleep. At first I thought it was because I had a bounty, so I purposefully got caught and served time in jail, which stupidly doesn’t refill your energy even though you’d think Henry would sleep a day in jail away. Went back to my bed, still wouldn’t let me sleep, reloaded a save before the pickpocket training, still wouldn’t let me sleep. It’s definitely quite irritating but otherwise I don’t mind the hunger and tiredness systems, when they actually work.




I ended up being required to sit down at a tavern for a quest objective, but Henry just refused to sit down. Again I tried loading my game, this time resulting in me being teleported back to my bed and sat upon it. Standing up just lead to Henry sitting right back down again, stuck in a loop like the world’s most indicisive lazy person performing their interpretation of sit ups. As a result I had to start a new game.

I also experienced four crashes in 88 hours, and the game would often freeze for a few seconds often while traveling the countryside on horseback. I very much enjoyed my time with Kingdom Come, but these issues did have a negative impact on my experience by either occuring enough to be distracting, or being frustrating by costing me hours of playtime.


The bugs aside though, Warhorse Studios’ attention to detail is staggering. Pulling up a picture of an in-game church on google will show you that church as it is in real life. Blacksmith tools rest near their feet and finished horseshoes hang from wooden beams in the ceiling. The feeling you get of actually being there is commendable.




Sound and Music

The music in this game is amazing. Whether it’s a swelling orchestral piece playing as the camera sweeps over for an aerial shot, or a jaunty flute n’ lute tavern jamboree playing as you beat a village yokel at Farkle, it’s great music to just lean back and listen to. It’s work easily comparable to that of Jeremy Soule or Grant Kirkhope.


Sound is also exquisite. Two swords clinking together in battle sound like actul swords clinking, the sound of a mace bouncing off plate armor is almost perfectly representative of the real thing, and the sound of a sword piercing plate armor to deliver a mercy kill makes the action feel as if it’s real. A bow loosing an arrow sounds like the realistic ‘thump’ of a real bowstring losing its tension.

Conclusion and Verdict



Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a game I wasn’t sure I’d like, like many people I feared the hunger and sleep mechanics might be too intrusive or that a heavy focus on realism would make the game less fun. Yet here I am 88 hours and ten minutes later with a fantastic story fresh in my mind, many great memories of NPC and world interaction and the strong desire to play through the whole thing again. It’s very much a breath of fresh air, and a refreshing change of pace compared to all the other most popular RPGs on the current market.


The game is clearly a passion project of indie developers Warhorse Studios, and what these men and women managed to accomplish with just around 80 people and $5 million is completely astonishing. This is the very first game to ever come out of the studio and with a bit more polish Kingdom Come would be nearly indistinguishable from a triple A product produced by Bioware or Ubisoft. It’s also a very genuinely fun and enjoyable game with plenty of player agency and replayability. Every player will have a different experience.


It’s for these reasons I give Kingdom Come: Deliverance a glowing recommendation and implore anyone who enjoys open world sandboxes and/or RPGs to at the very least try the game given the chance. It won’t be for everyone naturally, it has a bit of a learning curve and still needs a bit of polish, but I genuinely believe it is a fun and well-made product that is absolutely worth experiencing.

Glowing Recommendation! Kingdom Come: Deliverance is developed by Warhorse Studios and Published by Deep Silver for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.



If you have any questions or I left out a crucial detail, please feel free to comment down below!

