Remember when people kept saying that Final Fantasy XIII got really good after about 20 hours? That's a big chunk of time to ask people to dedicate to something they might not enjoy. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II doesn't mind making you despair for nearly 20 full hours of play before something clicks. It's truly an incredible achievement for Warhorse Studios, but many won't have the patience to see what makes this historical adventure so magical.
This game is brutally difficult at the start, though it eventually becomes barely a challenge. Protagonist Henry is a lord's bastard raised by a blacksmith, not one to have years of experience with the sword under his belt. While he's certainly more capable than he was in the first game, a calamitous intro sees Henry and his group left with nothing but their underwear. Everything from this point on feels like a struggle. Finding an initial weapon to fight off bandits and wolves is one thing, but your skill with that weapon is likely to be non-existent, meaning you'll struggle to block and parry enemy strikes.
Even if you want to avoid combat, your speech skills are low. Your stealth skill is low. Your thievery skill makes even the easiest of locks awkward to pick. It's all an uphill battle, and while taking out stray bandits will reward you with loot, wearing anything recognized as "stolen" by villagers lands you in trouble. There's no easy way to move up in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and you have to start right at the bottom -- early quests see you herding sheep for people who are even poorer than you.
The game's first region -- Trosky -- feels large, but tightly interconnected. Quests and character relationships weave between one another, and as long as you understand those relationships, you might be able to uncover new information or solutions. If the voivode of the Roma camp refuses to deal with you, speaking to his wife or son will reveal that he'd never turn down a wager. If someone tries to rope you into some shady dealings, you can speak to the bailiff to report them, ending the quest early. If someone in a quest offers you the option of double-crossing the quest giver, you can return to that person to report what they've said. These options aren't signposted -- you'll organically come across them as you talk to relevant characters.
The options that each quest presents are undermined somewhat by their outcomes. You might fight to stop a settlement being burned to the ground, but then your solution to cover up your crime will involve ... burning the settlement to the ground. Sometimes, your actions in a battle -- and which enemies you choose to prioritize -- will lead your allies to fall prematurely. These are dynamic challenges that force you to think quickly and make mistakes, and that feels like the essence of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.
The game is at its best when quests roll into one another. Your search for your missing dog rolls into meeting the local gamekeeper, whom you must save from a tree, and then work with to arrest poachers. The gamekeepers tell you about the local herdboys who need help protecting their flocks. Helping Tachov's blacksmith find his missing wagon ropes you into a horseback adventure through the woods where you hunt down bandits -- only one of those bandits then surrenders, and you'll later be getting quests from him to hunt his old friends.,/p>
Everyone knows everyone else in the Trosky region, and the way the world opens up as you undertake tasks for the people you meet feels natural and slick. It's necessary, too. Your battle skills are below par until you take down a travelling swordmaster in two duels, as he teaches you an important combat ability. The miller is up to something shifty, but that functions as a comprehensive tutorial for stealth, thievery, lockpicking, and takedowns. You might want to beeline the main story, but you'll need fine clothes and decent stats for certain quests.
It's better that way, honestly. KCD2 is a large game, and it's something you should take your time with. You'll slowly feel the immense struggle of the early hours melt away as you get better with the sword, find your loyal hound, and acquire a horse with which to race across the countryside. While you'll feel like a stranger in an alien land in the early hours, you'll come to understand the game's mechanics and evolve into a force to be reckoned with.
At some point in the game's Kuttenberg region, the difficulties with combat evaporate. Whereas a one-vs-three situation would result in almost certain death in the early game, later on, it's child's play as each foe falls to a few haphazard swings. When you have the strength to beat through shields and crush your opponent's stamina, there's no real need for tactics. It feels great as a power fantasy, but overshadows the nuances the combat initially presents.
To mix up the challenge, stealth and thievery become more important when undertaking quests, and your enjoyment with that change of pace may vary. But once you've accessed the city of Kuttenberg, you're given a much clearer path to the end, with less need to explore and improve your skills before pushing forward. Things feel less interconnected and important in Kuttenberg, but the quality of the quests continues to impress, as does the city's scale.
If you do stray from the main path you'll find a "haunted" mineshaft, young people in complex relationships, an ancient crypt to loot and things to explode with gunpowder -- multiple times for that last one. That's all outside the main quest, which sees you breaking out of prison, raiding treasuries, attending secret meetings with lords, kidnapping, torture -- the list goes on. While the size of the second region doesn't quite justify the number of quests in it, the momentum of the main story doesn't slow down. Many triple-A games in recent memory end with a whimper, but KCD2's climactic main quests will stick with you.
That's the main problem, though. You just might spend 20 hours with this game feeling frustrated and angry -- the kind of anger you get when you've been stolen from -- and it's hard to get past that point. Even when you finally adjust to the flow and difficulty of combat, you're not guaranteed to enjoy it. But what will carry you through is the world, the villages, the characters, the stories and the rise to power fantasy. It hits the same high notes that the best open-world games do, but perhaps not with entirely even polish.
It's truly difficult to reconcile a game that presents so much frustration, and simultaneously, such a fantastic experience. If that initial difficulty curve with every aspect of the game ruins the game for you, you might not be able to take in everything that KCD2 does so incredibly well. As long as something clicks and you're able to play through, you're in for a brilliant game to reflect on, and one of the best open-world games of recent memory.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II clearly improves on the mechanics of the original game while wrapping up the plot threads and loose ends that the original presented. It's a tighter, more focused game that takes a few cues from the best triple-A open worlds to ascend the original ambition. Parts of this game feel unlike anything you've played since The Witcher 3 raised the bar for open worlds back in 2015, and that's some of the highest praise you can give to any open-world role-playing game. KCD2 is an incredible achievement, and Warhorse Studios has exceeded expectations in almost every respect. If you've got the nerves for it, you're in for a genuinely special experience.
Score: 8/10
Platform tested: PC