Kingdom Come: Deliverance - Review

The gaming industry’s slow but steady lurch towards profit over people has become depressingly predictable, going the way that the film and music industries did so many years ago. Paying 50 pounds for Star Wars: Battlefront and then forking out for each micro transaction and DLC that should have come with the 1/4 of a game at release was the breaking point for me. It felt like my inner child was being kicked steadily in the bollocks by the money grabbing man from Monopoly. There wasn’t even a campaign single player to hide my shattered confidence in after I was teabagged by a wookie in multiplayer. I have since taken up whittling.

Rewind to 2012 and the announcement of KCD way back when it was a kickstarter campaign seeking to prove that there was a yawning gap in the market for a hyper realistic, medieval RPG with the compelling tag line ‘Dungeons and no dragons’. There is a subset of nerd which this appeals to massively, brave introverted explorers who poured hundreds of savoury hours into Morrowind, friendless, lone wolves who conquered Calradia in their parents spare room; the kind of folk who sneer at tutorials and online multiplayer. We are a proud people, and when a man tells us he’s making an RPG to roll back time and defy the money grabbing trends of the industry, our tails start wagging and we open our hearts and wallets to him. The kickstarter smashed it’s targets and 6 years later Kingdom Come: Deliverance arrived like a breath of fresh air with a confident smile from the head of Warhorse studios, Daniel Vavra.

I dove into the first few hours of the prologue with wide eyed optimism, KCD immediately looks good, the authentic dirt smeared peasant hut that you wake up in hammers home the games strongest features; it’s visuals and historical authenticity. Your character Henry isn’t a bag of troubled muscles but someone far more relatable with his eager smile and West country drawl. The similarly simple minded supporting cast and a clear dedication to real storytelling makes the game quickly immersive and refreshingly none of the early quests feel like go and fetch filler. It’s well voice acted, and every location feels lovingly crafted, which was a pleasant antidote to the ever expanding procedurally generated universes of far too many open world games. The RPG purist in me loved the unforgiving nature of the combat system, and its gradual and rewarding learning curve. My very first fight, barefisted with the town drunk, ended up with Henry in a bloody heap on the ground, but rather than failing the quest and making me reload, life simply went on, the quest parameters changed and I was forced to try another way of getting some coin to pay for father’s ale.

About 10 hours in and the gravity of the situation has vastly changed, you’re no longer fighting drunks for coin, but are duelling invading Hungarian mercenaries in the name of your liege lord for the future of Bohemia. The pacing is well planned forcing times of urgency and allowing moments of calm so you can focus on hunting or tidying up some of the many side quests. Such is the attention to detail in the crafting mini-games, haggling, necessity of eating and drinking, that you sometimes feel like you’re in a medieval life simulator rather than an action filled, story driven game. To some this might seem a little tedious, and at times it definitely can be, but for those of us who've been living on scraps for years during the decline of single player games, it’s a welcome change.

Alas I must also talk ill of a game that I want so desperately to be perfect. Because it has some flaws, some pretty horrendous gaping flaws. At the point of writing the game has had 3 patches released, which were oh so very necessary. I had to abandon my first playthrough due to several quest trigger bugs, and before that had to reload saves hours in the past for similar reasons. It’s not just the quest triggers that are buggy either, the frame rate is poor, the animations frequently fail to work properly, and there’s something that ruins the immersion of a game when you’re making a potion and are suddenly thrown 50 feet into the air and subsequently fall to your death. Sadly this was frustratingly often. I can forgive a few bugs in a game, and I can allow leeway for the premier game of an independent studio trying to bring back the old ways of the RPG, but there were an unforgivable amount of bugs on release. The developers couldn’t have failed to notice this, such was their frequency and game breaking severity. So it felt a bit dishonest asking for a triple A price tag from a customer whilst delivering a half baked product.

However, since the patches, the game has vastly improved, although my horse still floats in mid air if it gets caught on a fence post, and I’m pretty sure that was never a historical feature of medieval Bohemia.

Overall I really like what the game is, it looks gorgeous, is refreshingly original and so much love has gone into crafting it. Too many game breaking bugs on release took away it’s momentum and left a sour taste in my mouth, so now on my second play through

I’m not as immersed as I would like to be. I’d recommend it now it’s been patched to anyone who harks back to the days of Morrowind where fast travel was a glint in Todd Howard’s eye and quest markers were for wussy babies.

7 floating horses out 10