Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Completely ruined by bugs. The game was fun and immersive until I could not continue. All the dead NPCs where standing as default models, the weather was off, and all events would not trigger. My time has been wasted and this is a 10$ game until they bother to fix it. I do not suspect this will ever happen. A massive disappointment.

For context, I have played the PS4 version for enough time to warrant 'some' review. I'll only touch the mechanical side of things. My overall experience with the game has been fantastic in some areas, and not so great in some, and I'll do my best to poorly summarise the 'fantastic' and 'lacking' points. Fantastic: -Graphics are effing amazing... I've never wanted to examine armor or the damp muddy ground before now. -Sounds are very well done... hearing my sword against someone's plate, that cut into cloth, or the rattle of my equipment while running is just so darn nice on the ears. -The day/night and weather is done so well. The devs seem to have put a lot of effort in the aesthetic realism parts of this game. -The skill system seems to actually matter. It works similarly to Elder Scrolls, where usage will increase the associated skill. However, with Kingdom Come, your bow handling is awful to begin with (yes handling) to the point where you have to wear vambraces for a while. Sword play also doesn't just increase damage, but the speed you perform strikes, or how efficiently you parry. Besides combat based skills you have those such as speech and hunting among others (sorry the review is limited). -Stealth is done great here. It actually relies on sound, and visibility to a more realistic level. If you wear heavy clanky armor, bright colours, or even the wrong footwear you'll be worse off... rather than simply relying on a 'stealth' skill (which it has, but is implemented differently). I have to mention some things I personally was disappointed with (you may not be). This is me coming from another medieval sandbox game. - Battle sizes are not as big as you want them to be. Simply put, don't expect many open fields with hundreds of individuals on screen, as there is nothing remotely close. - The large battles that the game does have are few... like a handful. - This is in no way an open sandbox. You battle and siege based on the story, nothing more. (cut short)

I really wanted to like this game. I have perservered up until now, but this game is not ready for the public. I have enjoyed sections, I can see this should be a great game, but it needs a year at least before the horror can be resolved. I'm going to park my efforts on this game and come back in a year or two, maybe it will be finished at that point.

This game is riddled with some of the worst design choices i have ever seen in a game. Archery is stupid. The draw time and aiming don't make sense. I've actually fired a bow in real life. Both recurve and longbow. Horses. Again, something I have real world experience with. I can safely say, without reservations, that horses can run through a bush. For some unfathomable reason the devs put collision on everything. Small row of bushes, nah it has the collion box of a castle wall. good luck navigating the map if you leave the road. Poorly implemented mechanics all over the place. Lockpicking, ingame economy, reputation, crime, and training. all of them have glaringly obvious problems. And last but not least, the combat. Jeez, where to even begin?! I see what they were trying to do with the system. Have a real-ish combat system instead of hack-n-slash. Commendable. But here's the problem. The combat doesn't even follow the rules they explain in the tutorial. And the non-existent balance makes the game unberable. I'll give an example: This is a fight that you can't avoid, as it's part of the main story. There's plenty of room to fight (for once) but the enemy you are fighting is wildly unbalanced. I spent three hours trying different things to win the fight. One particularly anoying thing that happened was i tried riding around the enemy on horse back and shooting the enemy in the face with wounding arrows. Six shots in the face, one in the neck, and multiple shots to the body. The guy was still running around like nothing happened. I jumped off the horse thinking that i should be able to finish him off with a couple good hits. Nope. After being shot in the face neck and body repeatedly, he still wouldn't die after multiple solid hits from my weapon. He then perfect blocked me mid combo and killed be with a chained combo attack of his own. That attack was the only time he hit me. This game could have been good. But it's not.

Cute RPG experience with a horribly inconsistent combat system to go.