Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Review: An Amazing Masterpiece

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is more of Kingdom Come: Deliverance if you liked the first game. Well, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is bigger, better, funnier, and more beautiful than ever.

Warhorse Studios has gone all out to make Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 the game that they wanted it to be while keeping it as historically rich and vibrant as possible. Not only does Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 bring an exciting and expansive story, but it also gives you an astonishing world to explore, filled with quests and encounters that make time fly by.

TL;DR

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is still the same slow-paced and deep RPG that you know. With life skills to learn and use to improve your Henry or make a truckload of Groschen. The story starts off slow but picks up a grand medieval story of politics, intrigue, and war. Some visual glitches plagued our preview build, especially when it rained. But the performance on the Xbox Series X was near perfection.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Review – Let’s Get Medieval

Let’s start this Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review by saying that this game is for old and new fans alike. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 briefly recaps what happened in Kingdom Come: Deliverance and eases new players in. It’s also a good reminder for players who played Kingdom Come: Deliverance when it was released, like us.

Having played Kingdom Come: Deliverance does add some value to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. There are little jokes and references that will have you laughing, as the developers at Warhorse Studios are cheeky like that. For example, a vendor living under a bridge called Unterbrück (German for under bridge) sells a bag of nails. The fluff text is: Theresa would be glad with this bag of nails.

This is a direct reference to the first part of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, where you need to give Theresa a bag of nails. This clever humour is plentiful throughout Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and we found ourselves laughing out loud, pausing the game so we could get our bearings again and laughing some more.

As Written in the Parchment – Story

The story follows Henry from Skallitz, the bastard son of Lord Radzig and raised by the Skallitz blacksmith. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the story takes us all the way to being best buddies and servants to Lord Hans Capon, a medieval lord who was the first person to make YOLO his lifestyle with Henry to keep him somewhat level-headed at times.

In Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 we are tasked to deliver a message from Sir Hanush to Sir Otto Von Bergow deep in enemy territory with the hopes of starting peace negotiations. We are quickly stopped by a small band of troops from Von Bergow and need to explain our business. This intro section serves as a way to set the basis for your Henry; the choices you make in this first encounter decide what starting stats get a boost. But do not fear; you can eventually change or train yourself to be better in all available skills.

After this encounter, our Lord Capon feels tired and hungry. He says we will camp near the lake, even after being warned that it is an exposed position and a band of bandits is roaming this side of the country. Nonetheless, we get our boots on the ground and get some freedom. This small tutorial section covers some combat, dice games, canine interaction, and speech challenges.

After a wager and duel against Lord Capon he wants to go swimming with Henry to cool off, while in the water he hears some ladies singing and decides to sneak up on them and get a glimpse of a possible catch. Henry reluctantly goes along more to protect his Lord and keep him from doing anything stupid. While crawling through the reeds, our camp is assaulted; our companions that traveled with us and we just did some small quests for are all slaughtered.

The bandits go for the singing wenches doing laundry on the shore, and the knight in shining armour inside Henry takes over. He shouts to redirect the bandits from the woman towards him and Capon. As you and your Lord swim away, and in Henry’s case, an attempt at swimming.

And Thus, We Start Anew

While fleeing from the bandits, Henry takes an arrow to the shoulder, and a later encounter has him falling off the cliffs. He barely survives and is rescued by Hans Capon. He finds shelter in the cabin of an old herb-woman, and the game now begins.

Due to being mortally wounded, Henry has lost his physical strength and confidence in himself. This creates a template for the player to start fresh with a believable background. This start grounds the experience again and takes veteran players back to those early struggles with Henry being a bad fighter with no gear and no combos to rely on in combat.

It feels good to start from the basics again after all those years, get to grips with the new improved combat model and a chance to change things up for this play-through. We went for a speech and stand-your-ground tank build. If talking wasn’t an option, enemies were going to meet Henry the Wall and his Warhammer, as befits a blacksmith’s son.

Slow But steady – Gameplay

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a slow game. It takes time and practice for your character to become good at something. You actually have to train in an arena to improve your skills, do those combo training and sparring matches to get better as a character and player at the same time. That is what we loved about Kingdom Come: Deliverance and it’s why we love Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

If you want to get better at alchemy, you must search for the correct herbs and use them while they are fresh. The alchemy process is fully manual. You aren’t selecting a potion from a menu and watching a cutscene unfold with potions in your bag. You are making the potion step by step, and if you make a mistake, the potion fails or loses quality.

Things like this make Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 feel so immersive, you become better as a player as you start remembering the process of making a certain potion, start spotting herbs in a field of flowers. Naturally, see openings in your enemy’s defense, start to know when to strike, and get a feel for the range of your weapon. Your ranged weapon gets less sway as you level up, but you, as a player, learn to calculate in the arch and range of your arrow.

Going for a speech-centred build really helped us avoid certain encounters or unnecessary deaths, paying attention to what someone says, how our reputation with them is, and then choosing the correct lines in order to convince someone instead of resorting to violence. Having the correct appearance matters as well, choose to wear full armour covered in blood and your conversation partner will be easily intimidated, having freshly washed and looking very noble will help convince people in another way. The depth is amazing.

Become a True Blacksmith’s Son

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 not only continues the story and resolves loose ends left behind in the First Game, but It Also adds some new features. The two most prominent ones are the outfit system and blacksmithing.

Blacksmithing is a new trade-craft for you to learn and experience. It’s as hands-on as can be for a video game and has you slaving at the forge and hammering metal like your father taught you. Not only is it a nice addition, but eventually, the best quality gear will come from you making it yourself.

The outfit system is a blessing for min-max gamers and fashion gamers alike. You can now go shopping for a nice fitting outfit for Henry to wear. That nice outfit helps when talking and trading as you look a lot more clean and sophisticated instead of a poor beggar. But that outfit won’t protect much when an axe comes swinging your way, so with the press of a single button, you can equip your combat outfit, outside of combat, of course.

Other noticeable features are the graphical upgrades that come with a sequel. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 looks even more beautiful than ever and has become an even better Windows background simulator of Eastern European landscapes. Character models, armour sets, and weaponry all got a more detailed uplift, and some pieces just look insanely amazing.

Last but not least is the new combat model that is either a downgrade or an upgrade depending on how hardcore you are. There has been some backlash in the community about the combat becoming too simple now. That the Kingdom Come: Deliverance combat was for true fans, and that casual will now be able to play the game. The new combat model is a lot more accessible but still has room for a skilled fighter to absolutely dominate opponents and have a challenging encounter with a master.

Wanting your favourite game that you spend hours mastering to be more inaccessible for new players is just a dumb statement. It’s a toxic attitude that drives interested new fans away and hurts the studios more, which leads to the end of a franchise. Warhorse Studios took the right decision with the changes to combat and have nailed it.

And a small but really interesting thing: when a cutscene happened, Henry always wore the outfit we had selected. The helm or cap disappeared, but he was always wearing his fanciest clothes, hand-picked by us. These were full-blown animated cutscenes where Henry moved, and other characters interacted with him. It was a nice touch but did so much to immerse your choices into the game.

A World to Get Lost in – Visuals and Performance

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 offers a vast world to explore, and the story will take you over two maps. Along the way, you will encounter a ton of surprises, be it interesting quests or points of interest that suddenly unlock a dialogue option with an important NPC.

The quests and story are the real drivers for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. The loot game is interesting at first as you go from naked beggar to slightly competent soldier to knight. But the realism of the setting in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a limitation that Warhorse Studios utilizes to the max.

The limitation to the world and setting of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is its historical accuracy. You can’t put dragons, faeries, or huge trolls into a game that is based on real historical events. So your armour and weapons can’t magically improve your strength or have magical modifiers that set your enemies on fire.

This also means that your quest design has to be adapted and designed to break the mold of what classic RPGs do and have you encounter. But Medieval times sure were full of stories of witches, demons, and Satan worshippers. And some of the side-quests have you dive into that mystery and uncover some truths or more mysteries. The written story-telling and dialogue with NPC’s is so well written and funny at times, considering Henry is a pretty level headed and smart person for Medieval times.

Visual Glitches and Funny Bugs

Of course, for a project of this scope, it’s impossible to fix everything upon release. While some other previewers got blocked in some quests because triggers didn’t happen. We never had any issues blocking our story progression.

But we did have a tone of visual glitches, flickering when we were doing alchemy or looking at the ground when we wanted to pet Mutt. In some cutscenes, the focus was all wrong, or the camera focused on the wrong position of the character.

When it rains, it pours. Well, when it rains, the screen flickers black, and in conversations, a weird graphical glitch covers half our screen. We started writing down when it happened, and it always happened when it rained in the game. I could also hold down hard, and you could cross the road and bathe in sunlight.

Overall performance was really good on the Xbox Series X, aside from one area at the beginning of the game that mysteriously dropped in FPS. We had no stutters or annoyances with the frames, in performance mode, that is. The quality mode was visually not really an uplift due to the insane drop of frames; it was unenjoyable.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Conclusion

So yeah, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a masterpiece in our eyes. It has taken every free moment we had outside our dedicated preview time. When we had an open moment, we got back to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, eager to see what was over the next hill and what Henry and Capon would get themselves into. At a certain point, we were no longer playing the game to write this review, but simply because it was such a good game, we wanted more and more and more.

Most minor graphical glitches were either funny or a minor inconvenience. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 delivers hundreds of hours of deep, historically accurate RPG and a codex full of interesting historical facts. With DLC in development and a dedicated, passionate team that just wants to make a good game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has a bright future, and we look forward to it.

Thank you, Warhorse Studios and Plaion, for the preview key. Thank you, Warhorse Studio support, for the excellent help when Microsoft blocked our access to the preview build accidentally. Amazing help and support!

If you are looking for another stunningly amazing story-driven mystical experience by an amazing studio, check out our Alan Wake 2 Expansion Review.