I'm about 5 hours into Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a medieval RPG game from a Czech developer Warhorse Studios, and so far, it has mostly been a pleasant ride. While I've heard all sorts of criticisms about this game, much of it revolved around things that are unrelated to actual gameplay. I jumped into the game without knowing anything about it, really, except that it is situated somewhere in medieval Bohemia (now Czech Republic).
I’m glad to play a medieval RPG that for once doesn’t involve wizards, dragons and magic. Instead, the developers tried to make a realistic immersive game that proved that historical accuracy needn't be boring (if you throw in plenty of sword fighting in there somewhere). And playing this game I do feel like I am in medieval times. The towns seem the right size. No more cities with 3 houses and a church (I’m looking at you Skyrim). You play a son of a blacksmith and get mixed up in some pretty serious shit happening in medieval Bohemia.
The clothing looks authentic (I have no way of knowing if it actually is authentic, but I’ll take the dev’s word on it). Since reputation was everything in those days, you also have to dress to impress. More expensive clothing makes you look more important which can help in dialog situations. But your fancy new threads need to be kept clean though. You won’t look like a nobleman with pigshit all over your flashy threads. Besides eating and sleeping, you have to wash yourself and have your clothing laundered. It might seem like a pointless mechanic created just to annoy you, but looking at my filthy character in cutscenes does motivate me to get him cleaned up at a bathhouse.
Your character's clothes will over time become dirty.
Reading is something the main character, who is not of noble stock, can learn too. It’s interesting how reading skill is handled. You can try reading books, but when you reading skill is too low, some of the words get garbled and redaing ism’t as scmple as you might thnvk. Much like Skyrim, you can buy books in this game too and read short little snippets of the local lore, except the books in this game are based on real history.
Right off the bat I was surprised by the level of voice acting – the scene at the beginning of the game with the protagonist and his father forging a sword together almost fooled me into thinking I was watching a movie. Daniel Vávra's earlier Mafia games had the same enjoyable cinematic feeling. Too many games take the easy route of having actors simply read out lines into a microphone. Here, I feel like the scenes had the benefit of being actually directed to make them as impactful as possible. I dislike cutscenes quite a lot, but at least when they’re well directed, I can take my finger off the skip button for long enough to learn some of the story.
The voice acting is in English, which is kind of surprising since the developers would've had a perfectly justified reason to make the voice acting in Czech, if accuracy was their goal. Personally, I would’ve been fine with playing the game entirely in Czech, with English subtitles. The occasional “kurva” word does come up every now and again, just to remind us, who the people in this setting are.
The scenery is beautiful. The game runs on CryEngine and even on medium settings (which is all my precious 4-year-old gaming laptop can manage) it is gorgeous. If it weren’t for bandits and the Cumans (the historic nomadic mercenary army hired by the villain of the story) I’d do a lot more of wandering around in the wilderness. Trust me, you want to avoid getting into combat.
Which brings me to the biggest flaw in the game. Combat is kind of awful. While sword fighting is something I eventually got some grasp on, mainly because I’ve encountered a similar directional attack mechanic in Mount & Blade Warband, archery is downright impossible. The devs themselves seem to understand that, which is why they’ve made hunting so incredibly easy it’s ridiculous. One of the quests involves your character going hare hunting with a lord and the devs have nerfed the hares to such an extent that you can literally shoot them from a few meters away. However, those meters might as well be a mile away, since your camera shakes so much and without a target reticule, it’s nearly impossible to hit them. The hitbox is brutal. The arrow went straight between the legs of the hapless bunny, who then wandered a few meters away from me and stopped. That scene repeated a few times until after 8 arrows or so, I finally bagged me a hare, after which I felt no sense of accomplishment. I felt embarrassed it took me that long. And I'm no noob. I played Mount & Blade Warband as a horsearcher. Here's me nailing a horse of an enemy rider in the head with an arrow in Warband.
Yes, it felt satisfying, which the archery in KC:D simply isn't.
Since combat is so difficult, any hostile you encounter can and probably will kill you. To be fair to the game, it has less to do with the simply awful gameplay, and more with the fact that the main character is simply not supposed to be good at fighting, at first at least. He is the son of a blacksmith and he, excluding a few lessons in sword fighting he had, hasn’t simply had experience in it. It would be unrealistic if you give a sword to some peasant and see him defeat a knight in plate armor. In that sense I can excuse some of the poor gameplay experiences I’ve had, but there’s a limit. Fighting multiple characters especially can make you shout out in anger, when your character due to clumsy controls changes focus and turns his back on an opponent, who then unleashes a chain of attacks on you and you find out you’ve been killed. But at least when I pull off a nice attack and take out a bandit, I’ll feel a sense of accomplishment that I haven’t felt in a game in a while.
This game won’t let you mentally zone out and kill hordes of endless enemies for hours on end. Every encounter will have you at the edge of your seat, with sweat dripping from your forehead and your heart racing and your brain firing on all cylinders. One tiny mistake can prove fatal. I guess it’s a welcomed change from most other games. What makes this system incredibly frustrating is that you have limited saves. To be able to save at any point, you have to use up a special potion that costs quite a lot of money. That sort of money you might not have – especially in the early game, when saving is desperately needed before combat situations.
Still, it’s not enough to ruin the game for me. The realistic medieval Bohemian setting is simply too charming for me to give up on the game. This is the most fun way to learn about history.
EDIT: If you want to improve your combat skills, then practice at the combat arenas. That's a good way to level up your skills.