Kingdom Come: Deliverance

2022-02-20
Kingdom Come certainly lived up to its hype which I was very pleased with. In short it's a janky Elder Scrolls type game set in the 15th century. No magic, just knight shit.

It starts off very slow with a seemingly interminable tutorial that refuses letting you do much of anything in the game world. This continues on for several of the main missions where you don't have access to a lot of the systems till you precede past a certain point. Which is tragic because my guess is it will cause a lot of people to bounce off. For me I found it quite frustrating that the game basically wastes like 5 hours of your time before letting you go off into the world.

It's tragic because going off into the world is a ton of fun. You have a bunch of stats and skills that go up the more you use them a la The Elder Scrolls from all your combat skills to things like horseback riding or picking locks. There's lots of different ways you could spend your time from hunting animals in the woods to picking herbs and making potions to robbing people along the highway.

The real fun for me was the combat. Initially with your low stats you find pretty much any enemy impossible to beat. And that's even after you spend the time to learn how to fight mechanically. There's a certain rhythm and flow to combat with blocking and counters you have to learn. But once you get the hang of it and get some level ups under your belt you find you quickly become a god. Bandits that would whoop your ass before you can easily counter with practice. And they even build in this system of morale so as you show off your technical skills to lower level enemies they get terrified as they realize they're fighting someone who is out of their league.

There's a real joy to starting as this peasant who can barely whole a sword to this powerhouse who can take on a group of enemies and come out victorious. Add to this the joy of slowly building up a set of full plate armor by saving up loads of gold or picking it off the corpses of particularly well-equipped enemies and you have a very fun gameplay loop of hunting down kitted out bandits and slaying them to recover their gear and sell it so you can buy your next piece of gear.

The story is not much to write home about. I think it's very cool the attention to detail to how things would have been back then but it's a basic story of revenge and it isn't even really resolved by the end of the game-- seems they're leaving it open for a sequel-- which seems pretty lame.

Overall if you're starving for another TES game and want something a little different and an actual challenge I can really recommend it.

Oh, one final note on difficulty. They have some arbitrary design decisions like the fact that you can't just save whenever you want that makes the game unnecessarily tedious. Especially given the game crashes sometimes losing possibly hours of progress. Thankfully the game is moddable and you can just add a quicksave :)