Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

2025-10-04
I toil away the hours in the starting town of Kingdom Come Deliverance II picking flowers and brewing potions to sell for a pittance. I am reveling in a world full of promise and potential. Before the potential may wither away as I explore more. Here anything can yet happen.

I am a stinky peasant, even the woman in town begging for alms takes pity on me and gives me a few groschen. But I know this is Kingdom Come Deliverance, my destiny is to become a knight with pockets bursting from money, covered in gleaming plate mail, able to hew masses of men into moaning organic rubble. So I pick locks but don’t steal, to slow my accrual of wealth because I want the early game of being a weak peasant to last as long as possible. Where I may lose a fight to a mangy dog and a man in soiled clothes with a rusty sword. In my heart I know greatness is just around the corner so I cherish my weakness because I know it is fleeting.

See KCD is a game of stats and skills walking in the hallowed vein of The Elder Scrolls, of being shit at everything and doing everything over and over until you are good at everything and then a master at everything. I toil away in mundane tasks both as much to keep my Henry (the character you play as) as weak as possible for as long as possible but also because it is addicting. It is addicting, wiling away the hours slowly raising the million little stats for picking herbs, smithing, brewing potions, punching dogs, and drinking. Yes, drinking. “Drinking is a skill” feels like something a swaggering college freshman tells you in high school when they come home for break. Here it is just another stat to metagame. Let's talk about Henry's drinking problem.

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At 9 AM sharp Henry arrives at the Troskowitz pub, just in time for it to open. He purchases 8 bottles of Schnapps, 10 bottles of Mead, and 20 bottles of Beer. Ah and one Digestive. After immediately drinking all of the Schnapps, causing his drinking stat to skyrocket, he waits standing perfectly still outside for 8 hours. As the clock spins it abruptly stops after only an hour interrupted by a loud fart from Henry. The screen is blurred and the message “You are now unconscious” appears. Ah, right on time.

At this point the clock whizzes forward again and Henry wakes up a mile away in a ditch that people use for a bathroom. Covered in shit. "Dusting" himself off he goes to have a bottle of Mead only to find he is full. Time for that Digestive, which handily frees up some gut space for more alcohol! Mead'ing himself up he waits and passes out again, teleporting to some new location. Upon waking on the side of an unknown road Henry eyes the sun and approximates it must be just about Beer-O-Clock and tosses back a couple of the bad boys. Only realizing after he's four beers in that all his time spent unconscious meant the beer he purchased earlier has actually gone rotten. Henry is poisoned! Not to fear, Henry unlocks the "Cheers!" perk which adds a chance to every drink that it will cure the Poisoned status effect. Huzzah! Henry drinks a rotten beer which poisons him and then drinks a rotten beer that cures him of the poison. Now you're thinking with beer, Henry. Sidebar: at one point doing this I actually ended up poisoned but too full of poisoned beer to drink another poisoned beer to cure me from the poisoned beer. So I had to break into an apothecary's shop, black out drunk, on the brink of death, and rifle through his wares till I found a sweet blessed Digestive.

Of course after all this Henry is running dangerously low on alcohol. Henry ingeniously devises a daily routine where he goes from the Troskowitz pub to the Zhelejov Wagoners' Inn back and forth buying out the supply of one while the other one restocks, thus never having an inventory sans alcohol. At some point fast traveling between these two locations he is accosted by bandits. He is of course completely fucking shit-faced. The screen is blurred to such a degree that I can only make out the icons for combat but not the enemies themselves. And yet due to Henry's superior martial prowess I am able to handily kill off the bandits, even managing to brutally execute a member of a Bohemian Nu Metal band in the process. And, it turns out, saving someone who can't even tell Henry is rocking a 0.50% ABV.

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But like all things, the buzz does wear off. With KCD I hit a point where my Henry had developed into a true polymath, maxed in horseback riding, reading, speech, agility, swords, bows, stealth, lockpicking, and yes, drinking. With no way left to develop my Czech prodigy I turn to the myriad little mini-games and activities. But I realized in my journey to omni-mastery they had long since lost their sheen and became rote. No, I really don't want to mix 100 potions or bang a hammer on an anvil to forge a sword 50 times.

Well, that's ok I'll just go explore the world. Great idea! Only the world is far too large and repetitive. I spent the first 40 hours rinsing the first of the two maps in the game doing every single activity and quest, exploring every corner of the land. And it was great! Bohemia is a verdant, fertile land to behold. And yet all you behold is all there is. There are no hidden sights or treasures rewarded upon those who delve deeper. There are no depths to dive into. A town here, a forest there. Each town is as much the same as the other, a couple named people with some frivolous and boring quests and then endless, nameless "Guard"s and "Housewife"s, the same ten faces filling an entire province. Forests contain deer and rabbits and trees but no stump with treasure, no cave with a mystery to unfold.

This vast shoal of lukewarm entertainment is most evident when you get to Kuttenberg, the city of the game. It is visually a huge step up from the little villages you've been stomping about previously. But exploring it, you realize it's nothing different–just bigger. More people, more blacksmiths, more traders, more boring quests. There is no grand step up in the gameplay or your place in the world, there is only More. And more is not better–it's worse. Your trips to sell things and find merchants and fetch things for fetch quests, each are now only elongated by the fact that they're spread out over a greater area. Hope you leveled up Henry's agility because that boy will be traipsing his ass up and down town all day long.

And yet I always have the simple joy of skewering my fellow man on the end of a sword. Yes, the combat started great and ended great and whether I was fighting for my life against bandits in the early game or winning against a crowd of well kitted mercenaries in the late game, I was having a good time. It is weighty and dire, so you'll know the feel of a hit that finally lands, and you'll know if you're winning not from a health bar, of which there are none, but based on the blood beginning to coat your opponent and their morale audibly dissipating in their increasingly grim barks. It scratches the RPG-brain itch with plenty of stats to level and augment with far too many equippable slots of gear. And while it initially seems like the ultimate strategy is to just sit there and Perfect Block your enemy and counterattack, the Master Strike comes to the rescue to offer the option to get a guaranteed flourish of a hit against your enemy at the risk of getting cracked yourself. And I won't even go into how good it is to learn how to aim a bow with no targeting reticule or perform the combo to choke out someone in a hand-to-hand fight.

The last thing you'll do if you're like me–after you realize the world doesn't have many sights to see–is push Henry along his pre-destined Main Story path. And thankfully it is mostly great. The biggest draw for me was the cast of charming, shameless, and heroic characters, each with phenomenal voice actors, my favorite of course being the pock-marked, drunk, deviant bandit-who's-actually-a-noble, Dry Devil. There are big set-piece swings involving castles, prison breakouts, heists, and horse chases. And it finally resolves the plot that felt like it was just beginning at the end of the original Kingdom Come Deliverance. It's a shame then that it spends about as much time tripping over itself with faff and tedium. Why in the quest "The Italian Job" is one of the main sections basically "mediate a dispute"? Fuck ME that's some boring shit. I get it — the developers crank themselves off on history, as evidenced by the encyclopedia of Ye Olde Shite you constantly get pop-ups for (“This is how people threw pots of shit out of their window,” or whatever) — but come on, guys!

For the first twenty hours I had that special feeling deep in my loins that I was playing my GOTY for 2025. A true successor to The Elder Scrolls, replete with skills to level, a power curve from piss-peasant to piss-lord, and a whole world of things to see, of adventures to have. While it didn't end up hitting those lofty heights, largely in part to its very pleasantly simulated but ultimately lifeless open world, it still was absolutely a game that gripped me to the tune of 80 hours. God, I can't even tell you how many hours I spent just hand-to-hand fighting random civilians in Kuttenberg and then knocking unconscious 10 guards back-to-back. I'm a psycho about finishing games, never faffing about in one for too long–so for a combat system to be so engaging I just want to turn Henry into a groyper and a punch a dog in the street and fight the ensuing mob off from killing me with swords–that's when you know it's That Good Shit.

Cheers, Henry! I raise my 10 bottles of Schnapps to you. May we meet in a shit filled ditch on the other side.