- Tested on PC using a code provided by the editor.
- Test configuration: RTX 4090 + i9-9900K = 60 FPS constant and smooth at all times (with all graphical options in ULTRA + DLAA).
- Campaign completed in 57 hours according to game and 74 hours according to Steam.
- I did about half of the secondary quests.
- I have also installed a mod very useful for saving at will, rather than having to craft a backup potion. However, I have always assumed the consequences of my actions and have never revived the old safeguard, roleplay You have to.
Having never put his hands on the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance, it is imbued with innocence and virgin of any information I have launched its sequel, described by its developers as « ultimate medieval adventure ». The action took place in 1403 in a Bohemian Kingdom torn apart by a conflict between King Wenceslas IV and invader Sigismond, king of Hungary and Croatia. Henry of Skalitz, the squire of the noble Hans Capon, is played there, while the latter are about to visit the noble Otto von Bergow, in order to clarify the camp chosen by the latter. Obviously, nothing is going to happen as planned...
The field key
Barely the game launched that its beauty, both graphics and artistic direction, jumps to the eye. I can assert it to you loud and clear: you have never seen forests, fields or virtual villages as beautiful, organic and realistic as those depicted in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 (KCD 2). As far as I am concerned, the desire to leave the red thread of the main quest has never been so strong, as environments are a call to wandering and wandering, two major facets of this open world where danger never goes far.
As such, the first twenty hours of adventure are absolutely memorable. Indeed, once the introduction has passed, it is completely savoury, stinking and underwear that our epic begins. The huge map then opens to us as far as we can see, the desire to run in the fields flooded our veins, we are Henry of Skalitz, a defender of bandits and... HOP HOP HOP NOT IF WENT!
Did you really think you were gonna be able to start your journey like this? You're in brief, you stink so much that passers-by insult you, your reputation is at the lowest, you're in pain everywhere, synonymous with malus of statistics, and besides you don't have a round, nothing, nada. Welcome to Jojo le clodo Simulator. I will remember all that was involved in my initial quest for clothes and food, this piece of bread that I stole and that I earned three days in the pillory, or those two men who broke my face and dug up after I had the misfortune to intervene in their neighbourhood conflict (to tell them that they were as stupid one as the other was perhaps not very clever, I conceded it, but from there to steal my shoes while I lay unconscious in a pile of dung?!).
It must be said that in 2025 we are not used to starting a role-play that holds us so little by the hand, let alone seeing a main protagonist being spit out and throwing rotten onions in the face, under the hues of a bunch of ass-terreux. Following this misadventure, the villagers will hold you in low esteem while the guards will watch you closely. As for merchants, they will refuse to offer you good prices or even trade with you.
Rejected by society and hungry, you will soon find yourself in search of a bed or barn to spend the night in a catimi (for your character must also rest under penalty of falling asleep!). Be surprised and you will be sent back to the pillory, unless you don't have enough to bribe the accuser, you don't attack or you manage to negotiate. Just sleep and he will remember you and will not fail to go to the guard when he wakes up, even if you are at the other end of the map at that time.
The same applies to larvals, if you steal a silver cut from a kitchen without showing yourself, but a passerby saw you enter the room before your mischief, then it is you who will logically be accused and the guard will ask you to empty your pockets. Continue to commit incivilities, then you will be marked with red iron or even executed or a/ minimum Honoured by all the communities in the round. Oh and I forgot to point out that the game has VERY good memory and will long remember your every action.
What I write here is just a tiny glimpse of how the world of KCD 2 meets your actions and the objective is not to compile the catalogue of its many mechanics. It is also one of the greatest forces of the game, Everything, from the routines of characters to emerging gameplay situations, really everything gives the impression that this medieval universe evolves according to its own laws, whether or not the player is there to be spectator of events. I even found the open world more credible than in Red Dead Redemption 2, however grandiose, in the sense that it appears as less scripted and much more organic, probably because it is subject to many more statistical factors, RPG obliges. At no time did I get the impression that the NPC routines had one side « amusement park » A little superficial as it can sometimes be the case in Rockstar productions.
A tip, finally, embark on the blind adventure and especially do not watch a guide or these horrible videos of style « 10 things to know before launching KCD 2 ». It would be missing the best of what he has to offer. Accept KCD 2 is a deliberately slow game, which likes to envy decompose its gameplay into a bit rebarbative substrates, but devilishly rewarding. The craft of a potion requires, for example, to pick fresh herbs after reading what they looked like in a book, then to find a bench of alchemy, to organize well, to heat the water, to turn a hourglass under penalty of crafting cat's pee and losing all your ingredients, etc. The more you perform an action in KCD 2, the better your character becomes and the more you unlock perks (stats bonus) in the area of affiliated competence. It is by forging that we become blacksmith!
When Middle Ages rhymes with lack of balance
Very interesting on paper, however, this system shows its limits after about twenty hours, the fault of perks too generous, to the point of making the game really too easy. It is in these waters that all the mechanics mentioned above derailed, making my Henry of Skalitz a God of the Middle Ages. In my case, the trigger was the random discovery of a noble man's corpse in the middle of a forest. Having no idea what had happened to him, and taking advantage of the absence of a witness, I took advantage of the quietness of the early morning to untie him from his clothes bloody with buds, with a rather powerful sword, but above all, hang on, WITH A PAY OF LUNETTS!
With a high charisma bonus, this pair of glasses marked the beginning of my propulsion at the top of the social scale. I was then able to start persuading all the merchants to make me good prices, to misplay my status when a toothless man accused him of stealing his pitance. Like the far-right young documentary activist The Ties, I « put on the dediabolization costume », here glasses, and everyone fell into the sign. What do you want, bullshit, is gangrene, in the Kingdom of Bohemia as in Paris.
If you add to this perks If you do not want to be able to do this, you will be able to do it. Personally, this blatant unbalancing even in the middle of the game prompted me to focus solely on the main quest, for fear of becoming really too powerful. Too bad the secondary quests, and the dialogues of the game in general, are well written.
KCD 2 would have really won to scrap on his stats bonuses, to give a weight to the money we wear, to further restrict our inventory limit, or even to totally complex the fights with a triangle mechanics to the Fire Emblem, history of varying their approach. Over almost 60 hours of play, I spent about a fortnight fearing my opponents and 40 slicing them menu, sometimes without even taking the trouble of getting around. I understand that making the combat system more varied could have harmed the realism desired by the developers, but I doubt that anyone in the Middle Ages could in any case have chained 10 opponents in the wake screaming when he was alone dressed in armor. The ultimate proof of these wanderings of game design being that I have kept the same equipment for the last 30 hours, without ever changing, a peak for an RPG. There was clearly a balance to be found.
Verdict
With an original universe, uncompromising gameplay laws, a credible and exciting open world, memorable characters and convincing writing, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an atypical AAA that transcends the passion of its creators to its smallest detail. If we regret a balance with strawberries that ends up making the adventure much too easy, a few lengths in the main quest and a humor with the right franquette sometimes a little redundant, we come out with memories of dozens lived at the controls of the destiny of « our » Henry. Never had an open world seemed so palpable, so responsive to our choices and actions. If KCD 2 proposes an epic main quest, it is in its moments of wandering, while we wander without specific objectives, that it offers us its most beautiful moments of video game. It's too bad that his mechanics are fluttering at a third of the adventure, but just for my first 20 hours experience, I have to forgive him.For
- A broad, responsive and graphicly sublime open world
- Rugged game mechanics without concessions
- The amazing care given to the architecture of the villages and Kuttenberg, the costumes, the forests, and I pass by
- Characters, charismatic and memorable
- A game that requires involvement to be tamed
- The delicious slowness of some systems
- Every step off the beaten track is a treat
- Master soundtrack by Jan Valta and Adam Sporka
- Superb staging of cinematics
- The historical context
- The artworks of loading times are so beautiful that they make regret having a SSD
Against
- Balancing the difficulty, completely lost the first third
- Lack of sufficiently impacting statistical malus
- A few hollow times in the main quest
- No good humour
Your criticism makes you want to get on with it! Despite his flaws, it looks like a hell of a thing!
Yes, it's really a great game! I will also reinvigorate it at the next hollow of exits, for example this summer, to do the secondary quests I miss.
A bit disappointed to read that the game is poorly balanced, because I liked to shit on the first. However, you didn't take anything away from my furious desire to try... especially since I think I'm still the main target of the developers' potache humor!
The developers will soon add a Hardcore mode that will add modifiers, but this mode will also remove direction indicators which must make the game unpleasant to navigate (it remains an open world with precise goals, we are not in Elden Ring).
I think that the game would have been more difficult if I had played even more roleplay and I was forced not to untrace/break anyone (I even stole religious altars, it's worth it!), and not to make the pockets of noble corpses, but it's hard to resist:-p
This is still an excellent game! And about humor I laughed well at several moments, even though I'm less trendy potache humor as you qualified ^^