My version of Kingdom Come Deliverance was the Royal Edition for PS4.
Kingdom Come Deliverance is a complicated game. I can’t say with confidence that I love this game, but I also can’t bring myself to say I hate it either. On one hand, it’s an enjoyable open-world RPG with an emphasis on realism and historical accuracy. On the other hand, it’s a broken, bug-riddled, hair-pulling game that sometimes feels like a glorified list of chores.
With that being said, let’s begin.
To start with something more positive, the graphics in Kingdom Come: Deliverance are gorgeous at times. Sure, there are some hiccups here and there, and parts of the game can look a bit like plastic, but the landscapes are what I’m really talking about. Just look at this.
Pretty nice, right? The graphics are accompanied by a simple but effective score that imitates the music of that era well. The sound design is also well done. The clanking of armor as you walk through the streets, the sound of swords piercing flesh, maces batting against helmets, and arrows finding their mark all sound crisp and satisfying.
The biggest downside of the graphics is the pop-in and loading issues. This becomes even more noticeable the moment you acquire a fast horse. More than once, I travelled into the town of Rattay only to find floating heads greeting me instead of citizens. It would take a few moments for the rest of their model to load in.
The general gameplay loop of Kingdom Come is like most RPGs. You explore the land, pick up quests – ranging from assassinating an individual to picking weeds in someone’s garden for a half hour – level up, and fight, sneak, or talk your way around problems.
The combat in Kingdom Come is… rough. When you first start the game, you can hardly swing a sword. I found this to be frustrating but in a good way. Henry is a blacksmith’s son whose only experience in sword fighting is practicing in secret with a mercenary in his home village of Skallitz. And if you know where to go, you don’t have to spend long as a useless sword wielder before you gain the be-all and end-all of combat. The master strike.
The master strike serves as a sort of counter. Whenever an enemy attacks, you hit the block button at the right time, and Henry will perform a counterattack. This leaves enemies open for a follow-up attack. This, paired with a good weapon, can make the combat fairly satisfying. Unfortunately, the satisfaction is short-lived, as soon afterward, you’re killing all enemies in one hit. It becomes even easier as you level up your strength and manage to overpower most enemies in something called a ‘clinch’ where you clash against the other’s weapon in a struggle of strength. When Henry wins the clinch, he bashes the enemy in the head and leaves them open for a strike. In some ways, it’s even more overpowered than the master strike. Now the combat is too easy. You one hit enemies and boredom begins to set in.
So, what’s the game’s fix to this, you might ask? What is the equalizer that Kingdom Come throws at you to make the combat more challenging? Why, by throwing six enemies at you at once, of course. This doesn’t sound like a bad solution on paper, but Kingdom Come’s combat is simply not designed around that.
The problem with Kingdom Come’s quantity-over-quality style difficulty is that the enemies all die in one hit, maybe two or three with armor, but when you have five enemies surrounding you and all hitting you at once – meanwhile your camera is jittering around because you can’t seamlessly change your lock on from one enemy to another – you end up with a messy, frustrating encounter that more often than not leaves you feeling cheated. This makes the game feel unbalanced.
Kingdom Come also feels the need to give you combos with your weapons as if you’ll ever use them. Any attempt at hitting an enemy more than once is met with an instant block or parry. If you master strike an enemy or win a clinch, both of which leave the enemy stunned, you can only get one hit in before they’ll start blocking again. The combos, therefore, are useless. Even more so when you’re surrounded by enemies and don’t have time to pull off more than one hit.
Despite this Kingdom Come’s combat can still be enjoyable at times, under the right conditions, but it’s unreliable. So, what’s the other option? You can be a thief/assassin and avoid combat altogether, right? Well…
Kingdom Come feels like it’s doing everything it can to discourage stealth. One of the main story missions in the game ‘Nest of Vipers’ tasks you with sneaking into a camp with dozens of enemies, lighting their arrows on fire, and poisoning their food. My noise level was zero, and I wore all dark clothing. Yet, despite this, the enemies seemed able to detect me through walls and when I was hidden in a dark corner. This hadn’t been a problem for any of the other bandit camps (save for ones with dogs, which I’ll get to later) or houses I crept through at night for a bit of burglarizing. It wasn’t until I searched through internet forums that I found many others were having problems with this quest and getting detected, even those that had specced completely into stealth. You can choose to disguise yourself as one of the bandits instead and sneak through the camp that way. Except… it’s not reliable. Nine times out of ten, the enemies will magically see through the disguise and attack anyway.
In fact, the majority of Kingdom Come’s main questline is broken or unfinished. So unfinished that I couldn’t even beat the main story due to a common infinite loading screen glitch at a specific part toward the end of the main story. I had two hours of the game left, only to find that I could not physically complete the game I had spent hundreds of hours in. I had done every side quest I could find and had beaten all the DLC. All that was left was the main story, and the game didn’t have the heart to let me finish it.
Back onto the internet forums I went, where I was met once again with several woeful players suffering from the same glitch. The only commonality I could find was the suspicion that starting the Woman’s Lot DLC might be the trigger for the infinite loading screen. This brings me to my next topic.
The Woman’s Lot DLC is the worst DLC I have ever had the misfortune of downloading or playing. It’s the only DLC in the Royal Edition that requires a game update to download. It’s almost as if the game itself knows the horror that awaits and is desperately warning me to stay away. I should’ve listened. But let’s start with one of Woman’s Lot’s most egregious sins.
Dogs.
That’s right. I said dogs. Not the dogs that sit in the backyards of the wealthy nobles I rob, but dogs that guard bandit and Cuman camps. I could mention Mutt, the dog you get as a travel companion in the game, but other than a door blocker and rabbit hunter, he is useless. If you want to hunt rabbits and don’t feel like trying to aim your bow – which, even after fully leveling up your archery skill, Henry still swings back and forth as if he’s had one too many Savior Schnapps – you can run up to them and poke them with a longsword. Problem solved. Speaking of Savior Schnapps, I enjoy the idea of a limited save system, just not when the game is still this broken. This game can so easily flush three hours of gameplay down the toilet because of a random crash, glitch, or corrupt save. My saved data was corrupted twice in my time with Kingdom Come, both times losing hours of progress. No, this game did not benefit from Savior Schnapps. If it was more polished, it would have.
Back to the dogs. I wish I could fathom what possibly went through the head of whoever came up with the idea to add guard dogs at every other bandit camp. They instantly detect you when you get within a certain range of the camp, alerting every guard around. Then they run up to you and grab your arm long enough for the five to six enemies to surround you and pummel you to death. No amount of master striking can get you out of that one! You can’t distract them, you can’t get mutt to kill them, and you can’t hit them with the bow with Henry’s drunken aim.
But that isn’t the worst part of these DLC dogs. There are two methods of averting dogs in Kingdom Come. There is the Aesop Potion, a potion that makes dogs friendly to you, and there is a stealth perk called Dog Person, that stops dogs from barking at you. Why is that the worst part? Because they don’t work! How infuriating it was to not only have this perk but to take a hearty swig of an Aesop potion and sneak right into that bandit camp, only to have both dogs attack me anyway. That’s right, the two methods of dealing with dogs in this game do not work against the dogs added in the bandit camps by the DLC. Only the ones that sleep in backyards that you can easily avoid anyway.
The addition of the omniscient dogs only serves to frustrate and further discourage stealth, leaving you with the camera swinging, master strike spamming mess that is combat against more than two enemies. Even then, the dogs will grab you in combat and allow the enemies to get several free hits on you.
The other part of The Woman’s Lot DLC, arguably even worse than the addition of dogs, was Theresa’s story, which I am going to spoil because frankly, there isn’t anything TO spoil. Everything that happens you already know from playing the main game. For about two and a half hours, you play as Theresa in the events before the main story. What this means is a list of chores. Literally. The moment you start the DLC, it’s time to feed the chickens, then feed her dog Tinker, then pull weeds from the garden. Go grab a bag of silver from the mine and steal a ring from a chest. Follow Bianca as she slowly ambles her way through the forest. Then, since Theresa apparently can’t ride a horse, we must walk across the entirety of Skallitz to our next quest. Even when the Cumans invade, you get to stealth kill one of them before being tasked with another fetch quest. Go get bandages and magnolias for your dying brother that you already know is going to die anyway because it’s the first thing that happens in the main story. This whole DLC feels fruitless. Now, to the one saving grace of this part. Victoria Lynn voiced Theresa perfectly, and the scene where her brother dies is heartbreaking if only because of her performance. It’s good enough to almost make the chore list worth it. Shoutout to you, Victoria. You alone made this awful DLC a little more bearable.
As a side note, I really do love Theresa’s character, and it’s a shame she didn’t get a better DLC. Also, her romance with Henry is really cute and has excellent dialogue.
Sadly, it gets worse from here. You do get the chance to kill a handful more Cumans and bandits, either shooting them with the bow, sneak stabbing them, or poking them in the face while Tinker grabs their arm. You do all of this, optionally helping the remaining residents of Skallitz escape, before the worst scene in the entire game triggers.
It’s the last scene before the DLC ends, where your dog, Tinker, decides to approach a random looter and bark at him. Theresa hides around a corner and watches, calling her dog quietly back over to her. Tinker continues to bark and growl at the looter. Then, in a moment that made me want to throw the game away right then, the looter kills Tinker with his hatchet, and Theresa does nothing to save him. Now, you may argue that there was nothing Theresa could have done, but at this point, she has shot, stabbed, and poked multiple bandits, AND tinker has always been able to grab at the arm of enemies long enough for her to run in for the killing blow, and now he suddenly… can’t? The game has the gall to make us watch as Theresa rushes to Tinker’s limp body as the looter escapes, mourning the loss of her dog. “Why oh why did this happen?” she should have cried as she adjusted the bow and a dozen arrows on her back, teardrops falling on the razor-sharp, blood-soaked dagger resting in her lap. This part of the DLC is awful, and I wish I had just watched the cutscenes instead, if only for that one scene with Victoria’s great voice acting.
But I suppose I’m being unfair. The Woman’s Lot DLC has two parts. The first part is Theresa’s story, which is terrible. Conversely, the second part of the DLC is the best quest-line in the entire game: Johanka’s quest with Henry. These quests revolve around Johanka, who claims Mother Mary is speaking to her in visions. The questline itself is unique and fun and leads to one of the best scenes in the game, where Johanka is on trial, and depending on your actions, you get one of three endings. I enjoyed this part of the DLC. If this quest had been the only addition Woman’s Lot brought to the game, it would be the best DLC in Kingdom Come. Also, the game never tells you if Johanka’s visions of Mother Mary were real or not. It leaves that completely ambiguous, and it’s a genius move on Warhorse’s part.
The other DLCs were fine. Band of Bastards was a fun ride; I enjoyed getting to know the bandits and how unique they were, but it ended rather plainly. I also enjoyed rebuilding Pribislavtiz from the ground up in From the Ashes. It was nice to have my own player village to return to and get unique items from. I recommend getting the archery range, as it enables you to buy the best bow in the game. Also, the baker is better than the butcher because of the drying shed, which lets you dry meats and other foods so they never spoil.
The story goes up and down in this game, but for the most part, it’s good. I enjoy Henry and his interactions with other characters. This might be an unpopular opinion, but I absolutely adore the friendship Hans Capon and Henry have. By the end of the game, which I watched on YouTube due to the infinite loading screen I mentioned before, Henry and Capon feel like brothers, goading at each other, but in a friendly way.
Some of the story moments are also very exciting. Henry’s confrontation with Runt is one example of this. The only weak moment in the story that comes to memory is the monastery. Henry is tasked with killing a man named Pious so he can infiltrate a group of bandits. The problem is Pious doesn’t go by Pious anymore, and to find out who he is, you must join the monastery and spend hours following the routine and schedule of a monk to the letter or you will be accosted by the monk police. Or… you can look up who Pious is online, find him, kill him, then leave without even joining the monastery. I recommend anyone else do the same. Search up who you’re supposed to kill, sneak into the monastery at night, and kill them in their sleep. Boom, discount Assassin’s Creed mission. You’re welcome. I just saved you hours of tedium.
Something I saw more than once in my time figuring out Kingdom Come is every time I went on a subreddit or a forum to figure out an issue with the game, there were always a dozen people defending the game with the argument of ‘realism’. Combat isn’t designed for fighting more than a few people at once. “Well, you’re just bad at the game. It wouldn’t be realistic to fight a bunch of people at once.” Then why does the game expect you to? The only way around it is to run desperately to your horse, ride away a few feet, turn around, fire an arrow into the crowd and hope it lands, then repeat ad nauseam. It’s not fun or effective to fight like that, and it feels more like cheating the game A.I. than actually using a method the developers intended you to utilize.
I get it. Realism can be good in games, and I’ve often used realism to defend games that I enjoy, like Red Dead Redemption 2. But there needs to be a balance between realism and fun. It’s easy to dismiss a genuine criticism of a game with “But it’s realistic, of course you wouldn’t be able to do xyz,” but that argument doesn’t always work. It’s good to have criticisms and complaints about genuine issues in games. There is plenty in Kingdom Come that isn’t realistic. A blacksmith’s son having to level up his maintenance skill with blacksmith’s kits and not being able to repair his own armor efficiently is not realistic.
It’s obvious Warhorse studios put a lot of passion into this game, but sometimes it feels like they did everything they could after the fact to sabotage their own efforts. The addition of dogs, the awful woman’s lot DLC, the refusal to fix game-breaking bugs in the main story of all places.
This game has so much potential to be more than it is. And yet, despite all my complaints, I can’t bring myself to dislike this game because I can see the passion behind the project, and I can respect it. This game holds a certain charm that I haven’t felt with a game before. I wish more games would take risks like Kingdom Come did, even if it doesn’t always turn out for the best. That’s why I’m also a fan of Death Stranding and The Last of Us Part II, both games that have heavy criticisms, and both games whose risk-taking paid off for me and several others. Unfortunately, while parts of Kingdom Come’s risk-taking paid off for me (The alchemy in the game is very fun, and I have yet to see another game go as in-depth as they do), others didn’t.
Regardless, there were genuine moments of fun in Kingdom Come. Sneaking around town and looting everyone blind, or into a bandit camp and stabbing bandits (sans dogs), stealth archery, which I discovered late into the game to be viable and enjoyed thoroughly ever since. Once you get used to Henry’s left and right swaying and get ahold of a decent bow, it can be rewarding to pop off an accurate shot. Shooting a bandit with a bow and then relocating to do it to the guards that rush to your last known position is great. When the sword combat does work, it works well and can be lots of fun, smashing bandit heads in with a mace, especially with the head cracker perk, it’s hilarious every time, and who doesn’t like pulling off a master strike? I like that there are multiple ways to solve most quests, and sometimes ways to solve them that the game won’t even hint at. The fact that the game even allows you to bypass the entire monastery quest by looking the target up online and killing him is great.
But I think that’s why this game is marked as a disappointment in the title of this post. Not that Warhorse added updates that shot the game in the foot, not that the Woman’s Lot DLC left a sour taste in my mouth, not that the combat was frustrating and undercooked, nor the glitches that corrupted my saved data twice, and not even that the game wouldn’t allow me to finish the main story. What is most disappointing about Kingdom Come Deliverance is the potential it harbors underneath all of that. There is a diamond underneath all the coal, but it’s simply too much to dig through, and too much effort to reach for some people.
One day I will replay Kingdom Come, and when I do, I certainly will not be updating it with the Woman’s Lot DLC. As odd as it sounds, not having the dogs in this game brings it an extra point up alone.
Regardless, I am a lowly beginning blogger and not a professional review website. This is simply my opiniong and my experience. What I will say is that if you have the patience to dig through the coal, you may be able to appreciate the diamond underneath. I recommend Kingdom Come: Deliverance to any gamer that is willing to give it a chance but be warned: DO NOT DOWNLOAD THE WOMAN’S LOT DLC.
I mean, unless you really want to, but trust me, you don’t.
A.K. Rohner 