Reviewed by Buzz
Release Details
Developer: Warhorse Studios
Publisher: Deep Silver
Release date: February 4th, 2025
Available on: PS5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S
Reviewed on: PS5 Pro
If all history textbooks were couched in the interactivity of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (KCD2), then I would likely know a lot more about history. The direct sequel to Kingdom Come: Deliverance (2018), KCD2 is an action RPG set in Europe during the Late Medieval period. You once again play as Henry of Skalitz as he continues his life's quest: a dual mission of bringing justice to the villains who murdered his family and razed his village, and reclaiming the last sword his father forged.
Out of respect to the fans of the series and due to the narrative length of KCD2, all direct references to content and events in this review are limited to the starting areas of the game to avoid any potential spoilers.
Getting back in the saddle
KCD2 picks up almost immediately where the first game left off, with Henry riding alongside Hans Capon on a diplomatic mission to deliver a message to an influential lord with the goal of gaining their support for the rightful, but currently deposed, King Wenceslas IV. While some visceral reminders (as in literally haunting flash backs) help to remind you of the plot of the first game, KCD2 does seem to expect you to have completed the first game. There is an excellent and artfully presented codex that can help fill in some gaps, but it's highly recommended that you watch a few story recap videos if you're jumping directly into KCD2.
The first few hours of KCD2 are a deftly executed combination of tutorial and refresher on some of the larger plot points of the first game. The introduction is broken out into three loose arcs that continue to flesh out Henry's past and introduce you to the games core mechanics. While it's a long segment to get through before you're finally let loose upon the larger world, it was one of the better tutorials I have played thanks to its excellent pacing.
To start, the party makes camp and your companions chat about various elements from the first game, allowing you establish how narrative events played out in Henry's past and select skill areas to slightly increase to help shape your individual play style, such as weapon proficiency and core stat improvements. There are also plenty of "Well, as you already know..." moments to help try to jog your memory about the events from the first game.
Unfortunately, all Hell breaks loose as your camp is raided during bath time, leading to a chase through the woods and Henry taking a fall from a cliff side that puts him in mortal danger. This scenario allows for further flashbacks to the plot of the first game, as Hans drags a delirious Henry through the woods. Mechanically, this is also the point where Henry loses all his skills and abilities he had built up from the first game.
The second arc involves Henry performing tasks for the kindly midwife who saved his life, to both pay back her kindness and help heal Hans. Here you get a feel for the survival elements of the game, including how to feed yourself, equip gear, and wash yourself. Seriously, washing blood and muck off and making trips to the baths became a regular part of my play through. There is even an odor mechanic that can sabotage your stealth just by being too stinky.
Unlike some RPG sims, the survival mechanics are not totally at the forefront of game play and are more akin to daily upkeep rather than a constantly falling meter that you need to obsess over. Moreover, if you find the need to eat tedious, you can select various perks that help stave off the requirement. For example, I took one perk that helped food last longer before spoiling when in my inventory and another that made it so Henry needed to eat less often. I got by for the majority of my play through by carrying a few lightweight foodstuffs that seemed to be shelf-stable and never really had any issues with hunger.
After learning to feed, clothe, and bathe yourself, you set off with Hans towards the lord's castle and the final leg of the tutorial. Although turned away at the gate for looking, and let's be honest, smelling like vagabonds who inconveniently have no proof of their mission, you head back into town. After bartering with the local tavern owner for some food and drink in exchange for work, you get stuck hauling bags of flour by yourself because Hans is your better and not meant for work. This section does a nice job introducing the first few side quest hooks and how to accept, track, and complete side quests. It also introduces you to the crime and punishment systems, which are best avoided whenever possible.
Finally you are given free reign to explore, but life early on is tough as you lack the armor to engage in the more challenging combat encounters awaiting you on the open road. Worse yet, you start off so broke you can barely afford to feed yourself. There are a lot of options about what to do as soon as the world opens up, which may seem overwhelming at first, but the opening hours provide a feeling of excitement and discovery thanks to a deluge of things to do.
A brave old world
The world of KDC2 strives for a gritty sense of realism, as characters curse openly, play with sexual double-entendre, and bandits often seek to kill you on sight. Yet, it's not all dirt farmers living their worse life. In fact, the depiction of medieval peasantry was refreshing. I watched various characters go about their lives and every so often I heard them sharing a joke, exchanging gossip, or just hanging out at the tavern patio. Early on a murder occurs during one side quest and its given the extreme gravitas the situation demands by the members of the community, which was great to see.
It was also refreshing to see conflicts play out in such a grounded setting. Often in the medium of video games, the medieval setting is paired with low-to-high fantasy elements that rely on metaphor to explore deeper meaning and themes. So much so, that I had to keep reminding myself that when NPCs mentioned the presence of a "water goblin" at the local pond, I was probably not going to encounter any actual goblins. Issues like wolves attacking the town's sheep herd or someone missing in the forest take on a new level severity when not being outpaced by the presence of a looming fantastical threat such as a dragon.
Henry is an interesting character in the world of Late Medieval society thanks to his firmly established background from the first game. Blended elements, such as being raised as a commoner, the illegitimate son of a noble, and having been promoted to squire, all create an opportunity for deeper dialog across the more rigid class structure of the period. From there you're given the reigns to shape Henry based on your actions in the more open-ended quests. Your Henry might be devious and resort to all kinds of threats and thievery, whereas another player's Henry might strive for justice and mercy at every turn.
Graphically, KCD2 doesn't really push the envelope more than other contemporary titles. The environments are lush with vegetation and provide various panoramic open vistas of farmlands, forests, and cliffs, as well as a nice contrast found in the populated hubs of civilization found later on. Upon closer inspection, much of the flora can feel somewhat flat and out of place. It's by no means a bad looking game, just not particularly groundbreaking either. Additionally, the scenic views and slices of life were often undercut by clunky movement from wildlife (one notable instance involved a dead wolf that kept getting up and performing its walk cycle only to remember it was already dead and fall over again) or animation lapses by NPCs who would slide to their final path point like a chess piece.
On the PS5 Pro, many of the cut scenes had some noticeable stuttering and texture pop-ins, particularly when cloth and fabric textures needed to render. Lip-syncing during dialogue also proved to be an issue. As for music, the soundtrack is excellent, making use of medieval instrumentation with delightful arrangements. Sound effects, such as swords clashing or water sloshing, are also vibrant, although undercut at times by some significant audio tearing, especially during more climactic scenes.
Acceptable breaks from reality
There is an incredible challenge inherent in trying to make a game world that feels immersive and realistic, even more so when trying for historical accuracy, that also seeks to provide a sense of game play balance and the quality of life mechanics players have come to expect.
The monotony of enforced realism does get in the way of the fun at times. For example, before heading out on a quest that would inevitably involve some combat, it's a good idea to have some health potions. Yes, health potions, like the kind you quaff and which then rapidly restore your health (again, an acceptable break from reality in my opinion). However, crafting in KCD2 is all performed manually, with no menus to instantly combine ingredients when brewing potions or blacksmithing a weapon. Making potions has a certainty novelty to it at first, involving crushing up various herbs, boiling them in different liquids for a set time measured by an hourglass, and decanting the final result in bottles. The novelty of the experience wore off quickly. Doubly so when I occasionally had to go restock on the herbs I needed first. I often found myself coughing up the coin to purchase a few potions if I was in the middle of a particularly engaging quest line, even if that meant I would miss out on gaining some experience in alchemy by not brewing them myself.
The save system is the one facet that doesn't seem to make any sense in its implementation and was a point of pure frustration. You cannot freely save from the pause menu, which feels kind of baffling in a contemporary game / current year argument. In order to save, you either need to sleep in a bed that is assigned to you (not just sleep anywhere, but specifically in a bed you own or have been given explicit access to), or you can save on the fly but must drink a potion of "Saviour Schnapps". These potions are a limited resource that you can either purchase or brew, so as long as you have the herbs to do so and an alchemy lab handy.
What's odd about the design of this system is that it doesn't seem to be in service to anything as far as I could tell. Sometimes the save system is merciful and will perform an auto-save just before a scripted combat encounter that might be particularly nasty, or when hitting a milestone in a longer quest. I could see the quest milestone auto-save being a reason for this style of save system, for example, by locking you into a narrative decision right after you make it. Except that you have more than one save slot and could easily rollback and save scum your decisions if you really wanted to.
Knights and questing are like chocolate and peanut butter
Quests are where the world of KCD2 really explores some of the most interesting conflicts and experiences on offer. Quests can take on three forms, each of which involve varying degrees of complexity.
At their simplest, you have Points of Interest (POI), which you gather information on from conversations which then take the form of a marker on your map. These are often interesting but not story-driven locations that might offer a small reward or encounter.
Tasks are somewhere between a more epic quest and a simple POI. They might be hunting down buried treasure, or engaging in a side activity, such as a bare-knuckle fight ring. Tasks often provide greater rewards but lack the dramatic resonance of larger side quests.
And finally, there are the full blown side quests, which are often long, map spanning affairs that provide significant rewards both materially and by pushing interesting narratives forward. Side quests tend to show off KCD2's flexibility, as they might spawn numerous quest markers simultaneously allowing you to choose your approach. On top of that, quests might also provide optional markers, such as one quest that suggests you stop off to reclaim some lost laundry that might turn out to be helpful gear in completing the main portion of the request.
It cannot be overstated how organic the world of KCD2 can feel at times thanks to these side quests. I did find myself wishing that the POIs and tasks had been given slightly more attention, as they often felt like a to-do list by comparison. In one instance, the local shopkeeper, a man who interjects his language with German and is invaluable for his willingness to purchase almost anything, mentions that there is a lot of trouble in the region. In particular, he is upset because a recent cartload of goods he was importing tipped over into a local pond. This creates a POI on the map and naturally feels quest-worthy.
After making it to the overturned wagon and back to town in one piece. I hop off my horse, excited to reunite the merchant with his goods. I press the talk button. There is no unique dialog. He does not notice as I sell him back his own goods. The salt in particular fetches a few groschen, and I end up a bit disappointed.
And you would be fair to say I set myself up for disappointment. I would come to learn that sometimes characters provide information about the world, such as the bailiff noting the location of an open grave, as a way to give you things to explore, but they themselves are not interested in hearing about it later. It's a minor detail, but given the effort I went through, it felt like there should have been more interactivity in instances like this.
To arms!
You would be forgiven for being soured on first-person melee combat, as it is so often a clunky experience where it is difficult to gain a sense of perspective or depth in the flow of battle. However, KDC2 makes an argument for exploring this style of combat, which is good since it is an inevitable part of Henry's life.
When entering melee combat, your camera tries to fix itself onto the closest combatant. You are then given a star-shaped reticle, at least for human shaped opponents, which allows you to pick a direction to swing your weapon from to try to hit a side that your opponent is not defending. Likewise, your opponent will hold their weapon in one of five directions preparing to strike or block.
The most impressive and immersive element of the combat system is the chaining of guarding and riposting. By hitting the guard button when a shield icon appears you block the attack, and then a blue riposte icon appears allowing you to make a counter-attack. The enemy might block that and then try to parry, upon which you will find yourself entering into a back-and-forth until either you or they fail to guard and one of you lands a blow. Overall, It's not an extremely deep combat system, but it's sufficient and does give the sensation of a duel playing out.
Things get much messier when facing down multiple opponents, as your focus is pulled in multiple directions and you cannot block two simultaneous incoming attacks. But that's to be expected. The reverse is also true, as my dog would often be enough of a distraction for an opponent to turn their back to me and then it was practically over already over for them.
You can lose ground very quickly in combat. Your stamina bar's cap is reduced as your health is reduced, which in turn means less opportunities to attack and the less time you can stand your ground during a guard-parry chain. It got to the point, at least before I could get better gear, that anything less than perfect health meant I didn't dare travel outside of town for fear of being brutally beaten down by a roving pack of bandits or hostile wildlife.
Bows and crossbows are available for ranged combat, and you are encouraged during some of the early quest lines to carry melee and ranged options at all times. I often found that bows were more suitable for hunting than anything else, as a single arrow was often enough to alert an entire area of enemies, whereas stealth and a dagger could take out the majority of a camp unnoticed.
Perk points to spend
Henry's stats and abilities are made up of a variety for skills, including core skills, such as the expected Strength, Vitality, and Agility, as well as secondary and tertiary skills that govern checks related to styles of speech, thievery, crafting, and so on.
Skills and perks create an engaging system that naturally rewards your play style over time. Rather than having to focus on building up a particular skill, KCD2 encourages you to simply try everything and watch as your skills grow with routine use and practice. While there are certainly opportunities for grinding (you could opt to spend hours early on just brewing potions to max out your alchemy skill if you really wanted to), the process of gaining skill levels seemed to happen at a natural and even pace throughout my play through.
As you level up skills you also receive perk points that allow you to spend them to receive abilities and bonuses related to the skill that leveled up. This is standard RPG fare, but where it gets interesting is the way skills seem to interconnect, such as one Survival skill perk which would help increase Strength every time Henry collected an herb. This meant that suddenly herb gathering not only leveled up Survival, but would now pull double-duty for a crucial core skill.
Thou shall not!
Crime is a major mechanic in KCD2, and I found myself committing a lot of inadvertent crime at the outset of my play through. I say inadvertent because you're not given a ton of direction as to the expectations of proper behavior, instead being told that you should not do anything a good Christian wouldn't do.
To elaborate, here are some of the crimes I committed in haste and had to repent for at leisure:
Slept in a bed that was not mine - To be fair, I knew this was a crime, I just didn't realize the bed I was sleeping in wasn't mine. I was on one of the longer side quests and ended up in the forest near sundown. I astutely recalled the kind midwife who helped me was nearby and she even had a new quest for me when I came a knocking. Since we were such good friends and since the first bed I ever slept in was the one in her cottage, I figured it was fair game. It was not. All pretense of our friendship was gone. She demanded 25 groschen or Henry would be in the stockades again.
Walking through a barn - This was the start to my life as a trespasser. Many of the barns and associated farm buildings have an open pathway structure that makes them appear to be a causeway. They are not causeways. You will get shouted at for passing through them.
Using the wrong door to enter a business - Admittedly, this one is partially on me. But in my defense, the very first inn you visit has both a front and back door. On top of that, at least I was aware enough not to use a lock-pick on a door. You see, I meant to visit the apothecary, which would later turn out to be my Waterloo for crime, and I opened the door at ground level into the building where I knew the apothecary was thanks to some signage. What I actually stepped into was the storage room for the shop, which is actually on the second floor. The hired hand was not happy with me and threatened to call the guards. My bad.
Using the wrong alchemy lab - As Henry passes various facilities a message will appear alongside a map icon that notes their location for future use, such as drying racks, grindstones, and alchemy labs. The alchemy skill quickly became my road to early game riches, so finding one in the very first village was exciting. However, the one I found was in the back of the apothecary, and I running on video game logic, assumed that was free to use. It was not. I trespassed and was reprimanded by the shopkeeper.
Crossing through private property at night - As mentioned previously, the skill and perk system is deeply engaging. Having gained an alchemy perk that makes my alchemical concocting better in the wee hours of the night and not feeling particularly banged up or sleepy, I headed to the PUBLIC alchemy lab. However, to get to said lab like a normal person who uses pathways, you have to go through the garden next to the apothecary. So, I sauntered through to the PUBLIC laboratory only to be stopped by the owner of the shop demanding to know why I was on his private property at night and lamenting that I am normally such a nice person. I back-tracked and had to commit a small, but unnoticed, crime by waiting for the coast to clear and jumping the fence to run into the shed containing the PUBLIC alchemy lab.
Walking around at night without a light source - I was walking to the inn from said PUBLIC alchemy lab after having brewed a number of potions that I looked forward to selling on the morrow' when I was stopped by a guard shouting at me. It turns out, walking around at night without a light source is basically the equivalent of shouting, "hey, I plan to do crimes!" This was arguably the worst crime I did, because I lacked the knowledge on how to comply. Seriously, I couldn't remember the key binding on the controller since I hadn't had to use it yet and the guard basically kept shouting until I was forced into using a speech check to get out of the whole ordeal.
To be fair, only sleeping in the bed that hadn't properly been assigned to me resulted in a fine, and luckily I had the coin on hand to avoid the stockades. Committing crime takes two forms in KCD2: Crimes of ignorance which are often treated with leniency so long as you stop doing whatever you're doing or leave the area where the warning appears, and crimes that are punishable and lead to NPCs trying to apprehend you. When apprehended you can try to talk your way out of it, pay a fine, or end up in the stockades. Really terrible crimes can end up with Henry being branded, and committing the same level of crime results in his execution.
Returning to that thought about the narrative choices inherent in playing Henry, perhaps my Henry was one who didn't care to learn societal norms and he and I both just have to make peace with that?
Of course they had bugs back then!
Before I even get into this topic, I believe it should periodically be shouted from the rooftops that video games are hard to make, regardless of size, budget, or scope. This is a difficult medium that often includes internal and external pressures that can leave a "final" product in a less than perfect state.
With that opinion in mind, I often forgive a lot of early and launch bugs as being acceptable problems that can be fixed later. Nobody likes to see them, but as long as they are more cosmetic or easily avoided, they don't tend to be a major issue. However, when the bugs create frustrating experiences, I think it's worth reporting on them.
KCD2 is not so buggy that it is unplayable on the PS5 Pro, but I did encounter some significant bugs. Some bugs are just weird breaks in the physics or models, for example, an NPC sitting at a tavern table but floating a few feet above the table or thick black lines appearing at the intersections of body parts on NPCs.
However, my horse, Pebbles, would occasionally exhibit the same floating bug. This meant that I could not mount Pebbles, or if Pebbles eventually drifted to a spot where I could mount my steed, I couldn't actually move. This is particularly frustrating in a game where it requires a limited resource to save on the fly and therefore you may not have the option to quickly reload to try to fix the bug.
Some of the more serious but rarely encountered bugs involved the game freezing and requiring the application to be closed and restarted. Another bug refused to finish out a longer side quest as done in my journal. While it was only a side quest, meaning I could continue on with the main plot, it did mean I missed out on the potential reward for that quest and would just have to live with an open side quest in my journal in perpetuity.
Another bug I consistently encountered was in the alchemy lab. While the lighting of the lab would shift rapidly from bright to dim and sometimes the liquid in the cauldron would disappear and reappear during animations, these were more surface level compared to the delay for the boiling animation. Sometimes you are required to boil ingredients for a specific amount of time using an in-game hourglass timer. You want to flip the hourglass when the potion begins to boil and a raise the cauldron from the heat after the correct amount of time has passed. However, when the boiling animation is significantly delayed or fails to animate and you are expected to operate somewhat precisely, this can result in a less than optimal potion or just a waste of ingredients. I ended up taking a perk that forgives alchemy mistakes specifically in response to this bug and just started listening for the bubbling liquid audio cue over any visual indicators.
There were other more minor bugs as well, such as the encumbrance system not functioning correctly. Like many other open world action RPGs, a carrying capacity system is in place to stop you from simply looting everything and anything you come across. This naturally guides you to focus on taking money or valuable items as loot, while saving precious space for resources you might need. The bug I routinely encountered was that my capacity would be at the maximum, such as "119/119" and appear to be fine, no over-encumbrance debuff in the stats menu and the capacity units remained yellow instead of the red font which alerts you that Henry is overloaded. Outside the inventory menu, I was still met with the encumbered message when trying to sprint or ride my horse. While I simply had to unload something that weighed a single pound from my inventory, it didn't engender faith in the system working as designed.
I don't mean to harp on bugs, but in a system where saving is relegated to when you sleep in an assigned bed or use a limited resource, I often found myself in a situation where I couldn't reload or save my progress and had to hope for the best as I tried to work around a bug. More than once I had made significant progress on a quest that required I spend real-time time traveling to a new location, only for my horse to malfunction. This inevitably meant I had to deal with encounters on foot that I could have avoided entirely on horseback to save my stamina and resources for the real fight ahead. Given the potential for death in every encounter early on, this resulted in a lot of lost quest progress.
A little bit of controversy
I really debated whether to even include this section in this review.
On the one hand, no art is created or consumed in a vacuum. Every reaction to a piece of media can potentially shape it, be reflective of its impact on its audience and the wider culture at large, and potentially even provide a space for deeper exploration. On the other hand, I don't believe a development team should necessarily be held accountable for when people react in bad faith. So, I'll just say that at the time of posting this review the game is currently being review bombed by some players on Metacritic for the inclusion of an optional same-sex romance and a character of color (not the same character). Anecdotally, most of the review bombing posts I saw seemed to focus on the romance option.
There are the usual posts, comments, and reviews exclaiming that "the developer has gone woke!", "DEI!", and so on. More comically, there are the comments of "what if I stumble on that content? I don't want to see that!" (You won't. You would literally have to select the dialogue option with a big heart icon that says the words "Kiss him.")
Naturally, I had to see what all the fuss was about. It turned out that same-sex romance option, without spoiling anything, was with one of the most important and long-time fan favorite characters, and tastefully done to boot. I will admit I did chuckle at the not-so-subtle symbolism of their two unsheathed swords laid across one another on a chair in the foreground of the romance scene, but again, it was fairly chaste compared to other more explicit scenes.
I think it's important to note that the development team could have simply inserted a flat, throwaway character if this were just some checkbox they had to tick off on an inclusion spreadsheet. Instead, the character they chose feels like a radical and deliberate move. As always, I will never bemoan additional optional content in a game, especially when representation matters to those it represents. As always, play the game the way you want to play it.
The three states of man all boil down to this
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 takes great efforts to ensure the the tale of Henry of Skalitz is done justice. Many of elements of the game exude style, care, and an attention to detail that creates one of the most interesting and grounded depictions of the Late Medieval period ever presented in a video game. Despite some noticeable bugs and frustrating design elements, this game is an excellent entry in the Kingdom Come series, and I personally look forward to Warhorse Studios' next project.
8/10
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