Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Review - Hardcore History
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an island. Its uncompromising view of mechanics, its attention to historical accuracy, its protagonist who starts out with near no skills. It’s divisive. People will hate the difficulty of a lot of the systems, without realising that those systems ease up over time when Henry becomes more skilled. There are very few games like KC:D, because of the games push-back on ease of play. For me though, I adore mechanically complex games. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II doubles down on a lot of those mechanics, whilst also introducing new quality of life improvements to streamline some of the more egregious things in the original.
Taking place directly after the events of the first game, we return to the shoes of Henry of Skalitz. He is accompanying his lord and charge, Hans Capon and a small retinue to deliver a message to the lord of Trosky Castle. In typical fashion, it does not take long for things to take a turn for the worse, and the duo are left without much of anything to their name, in a region that they’ve never been to, and without the backing of the power that Hans is accustomed to. It makes an interesting setup, and you really feel the character’s backgrounds come into play about how they complete their own individual missions.
The characters really shine through the writing. From the end of the first game, I was very fond of the relationship between Hans and Henry, but it didn’t take long for that to erode in this title. Hans is nervous and scared and consistently makes bad decisions. Henry is staunch in his ideals (well, my Henry is) and will happily do manual labour if it gets what he wants done. A lot of characters are fantastic to spend time around. By the end of the game, you feel a real connection to quite a few, even though some of the characters are awful people. This is probably the most immersed I’ve been in a character, where I really felt I was making the decisions as Henry, not for Henry. My Henry is a devout, god-fearing man who has a respect for authority (whether it be his liege lord or the law), he’s committed to his sweetheart, Theresa, and whilst he sometimes has to do bad things, he does it for good reasons. He’s a blacksmith, he’d prefer to talk his way out of situations, he cares deeply for his animals. That’s my Henry.
I really enjoyed my time in the game’s regions too. Both Trosky and Kuttenberg regions are quite large, but don’t feel empty. Sometimes it’s nice to get lost in the woods. Sometimes you’ll stumble upon a landmark to enjoy, or find a patch of useful herbs. Maybe you’ll find some game to hunt, or run into a bandit camp. The game shines most when it leaves you to your own devices, I find. Fast travelling somewhere also might spawn an event. These can just be lore, or helping a stranger, or loot. A couple of times I ran into a person who was more than happy to talk my ear off, only to see them come up again later in the game and expand upon their own lore. That’s freaking cool.
If there were two things that were a bit of a thorn in my side from the first game, it was the combat and the pick-pocketing system. Pick-pocketing has been rolled into a Thievery class with lockpicking, which means it’s much easier to level. That’s huge. Combat too has been gussied up. Master strikes (once learned) have been made much better; now you need to attack from the opposite angle to the enemy when they are striking, rather than just hitting the block button in the original. This change alone makes combat feel a lot more fluid. You need to be smart in combat, because it can turn against you quickly if you tire yourself out.
There’s such a huge amount to the game that it’s hard to not spend five thousand words waxing lyrical. Herbs can decompose now, but you can also dry them. If you’re making potions with good quality herbs and follow the recipe, you get a better potion with new effects. I still love the brewing system. You can now blacksmith your own items, and each piece of weapon and armour has a quality. Smithing (late game) even has its own special quality designation if you do well, so it pays to level it up and make good weapons. There’s a whole minigame with smithing which I found quite relaxing, but I can see that some people might hate it. As with most things, it’s thankfully optional.
Crime got reworked, now you can have levels of crime. You can pay to fix the crime, or take the punishment. The punishment goes from being put in stocks for a few days, getting caned, getting branded, or finally, getting executed. All of these have debuffs associated with them. Caning reduces health and strength, and getting branded means you’re treated like a criminal until it heals, and merchants won’t deal with you.
I absolutely love the quest writing too. You’ll start out with a simple task, usually, but by the end you feel like you’re so far removed from that task. It keeps you on your toes. There’s also many ways to solve a lot of the quests, so you can play to your strengths. Quite a few of the quests had me laughing out loud too, which is no easy feat. Even during the quests, people not involved with the mission directly often have their own issues going on, like trying to keep an alcoholic game warden from getting drunk at a wedding. Very funny stuff. It really encourages you to look around.
The game’s not without issues though. Surprisingly, very few crashes which isn’t something that can be said for many open world games. I did have a few lighting glitches, and a few other minor issues with the game, but there’s an inconsistency with objectives that I was not fond of. Sometimes it’ll give you a rough area to check for a quest. Sometimes it’ll show you exactly where a person is, as if they had a GPS on them. Truth be told I am awaiting the mod that removes almost all objective markers. The game gives you plenty of information most of the time to be able to complete things without a marker. Maybe I’m just a sicko.
I always considered Kingdom Come: Deliverance a bit of a sleeper hit, despite the editors telling me it’s sold like 8 million copies. This isn’t an RPG for everyone. It’s fairly hardcore, it leans into history (albeit out of order) and it is mechanically very dense. What matters most, and after playing a hundred hours of this damn thing and planning on diving back in, is that it’s an RPG for me.

Kingdom Come Deliverance II was reviewed on PC with a code kindly provided by Plaion ANZ.