Kingdom Come: Deliverance Review: All the King’s Horses

The typical setting for fantasy, the sword and shield and magic setting, has often been used in video games. RPGs have most often set themselves in this era. This setting is so iconic that anyone could probably describe it. The Knight, Bard, Mage, and Rogue have become famous with their many fights with bandits, dragons, orcs. They’ve even fought and a dark lord or two. Kingdom Come: Deliverance released with the goal of taking fantasy out for a setting in a real time and place. This blends with combat systems that hew as close to reality as possible without actually holding a sword and shield.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is set in Bohemia during the Holy Roman Empire. The king has run away. His brother has begun to lead assaults on cities where the Lord may be loyal to the rightful King Wenceslas. Into this mess steps Henry, a blacksmith’s son who sees his parents killed during one such assault. He barely escapes and thus begins a journey from a peasant to a soldier. This takes the player on a journey of growth along with Henry. It’s just too bad that the game has so many stumbles along the way.

Graphics and Performance: The Brightest Flame Burns Quickest

Full disclosure, I played this game on PlayStation 4 (regular not Pro). I cannot say how it is on other, more powerful equipment. I have heard that it’s pretty bad on PC too, but take that with a grain of salt.

Somebody should tell him that a Mohawk doesn’t equal armor.

Gameplay: Mass Effect X Oblivion

The gameplay i split away from the Combat, since more time is inevitably going to be spent on the other aspects of gameplay. The moment to moment gameplay has you acting like Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect games, talking to everybody; spending a food deal of time trying to say the right thing to defuse situations peacefully. Most of these conversations boil down to stats—yours versus theirs. If your speech or strength or any other stat is greater than the other’s you will succeed. This conversation system is one of Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s highlights.

Stealth and pick pocketing gameplay are required. That’s pulled almost straight from Oblivion, except “am I well hidden enough?” is a question that players will be asking themselves a lot since there is no indication whether people can see you or not. It would behoove the player to just assume there is somebody watching and just not engage in stealth. Going with the theme of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, there is little to no feedback to whether people can see you or not. There are stats that will show players how conspicuous or noisy they are, but those don’t seem to have as much to do with a successful stealth attack or pickpocketing attempt as random chance.

The lock picking system is just a mess as it tasks players with finding a sweet spot in the lock and then rotating the tumbler while maintaining the sweet spot with the other stick. It’s difficult and finicky; and to to top it all off, the lock picks break easily and are fairly rare to find. This leads to one of the most frustrating gaming subsystems of the past several years.

The missions are all mostly imaginative and never seems to devolve into “go to place x, get so many of item y” and when it does, it’s more like “go get the bacon and wine from my horse fifty feet away.” There are some mundane tasks to be accomplished, but they’re always a means to an end instead of useless padding. The missions connect together in such a way as to constantly have forward momentum, leading to the player being invested in “one more mission.” Altogether, the non-combat gameplay of Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an engaging affair that keeps the player interested and engaged throughout.

Sound Design: Grand and Sweeping Yet Intimate and Grounded

In the gaming, the sound effects and soundtrack is like editing in a movie—it’s invisible unless it’s amazing or terrible. In the case of Kingdom Come: Deliverance it’s thankfully in the former category for the most part. The soundtrack is sweeping orchestral music seen in a hundred sword and shield epics, but here it’s used to really good effect. My one nitpick is that some of the music sounds very Irish, when the game takes place on the other side of Europe, but that’s forgivable. There are spaces, though where the music just stops like the music track just ended and the software didn’t load another up. This is kind of unsettling.

The ambient sounds are all excellent. The sounds of foliage or animals in the background of the woods for example show an attention to detail that increases immersion in the player. I recommend wearing a good set of surround sound headphones if possible for the maximum effect. Speaking of surround sound, the voices and noises are all placed in the right spots. This allows for noticing directions of people talking to you or walking around you.

The sounds in combat are passable. The sounds of swords and shields clanking together are very well done, but sometimes are a bit out of sync. An attack that connects sometimes will be pretty far into the damage animation before enemy pain is uttered. This is a big reason why there seems to be so little feedback in the combat.

The voice acting ranges from excellent to passable. The main character, Henry is expressive and believable, but there are times when he shifts from quiet and understanding to loud and angry, but that’s not so much the actors fault, but more the way lines load up dynamically if you fail a conversation attempt. Most of the main, named characters are really good, but there are a couple that have voices that seem out of place, such as many of the more minor characters; as if the developers grabbed several British people to play Bohemians. Overall the sound design is excellent.

The setting is engrossing, accomplished by fantastic graphics and excellent sound design.

The Setting: Like a 15th Century Westworld

I don’t usually talk about settings in these reviews, but I have a feeling that this is going to be the main thing this game is remembered for. Kingdom Comes: Deliverance is set in an actual historical time period using amalgamations of actual historical people. Thought the game, the codec fills up with the biographies of the people the main characters are based on, allowing for players who are into that sort of thing to learn about the various historical figures of the time. This means that even the class hierarchy is presented in a manner that the real people would have experienced it.

An insane amount of detail has been packed into every corner of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, from the armor and weapons portrayed being spot on historical items, to the houses and architecture all being built in the style that houses would have been built. There are plenty of YouTube videos out there of people who have researched the time period talking about all the details that Warhorse studios got accurate and how those details make this game like walking through and amusement park set in this time frame.

Ambition Isn’t Everything

Kingdom Come: Deliverance, despite the missteps will stand as an ambitious game that took chances. The setting and attention to detail will be what will make it stand out in the end. I don’t see there being much short term success, due to the wonkiness that has been much of the focus of this game, but in the long run, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a large following build up around this game like a Shenmue or Dark Souls especially if there is a sequel that fixes a lot of the weird aspects and builds upon the sturdy skeleton provided by this game.