Kingdom Come: Deliverance

After lots of patches and some graphical optimisation mods from Nexus, this game is actually looking good and running reasonably smoothly on my PC - I'm glad I waited. All the attention to realism and historical accuracy is very impressive, and setting aside there being a game to play, I enjoyed just walking around the mediaeval towns and countryside soaking it all in. Combat is again well-researched and as realistic to melee combat styles and techniques of the time, and even when I had the best armour/weapons later on, I could still get jumped by some peasant bandits with clubs and get killed quickly if I was unlucky. There is a lot to do in the expansive open-world, and a lot of game here for your money. I found that I was able to get the best horse and powerful gear pretty early though, and once I lost the feeling of progression money started to seem a bit pointless - in turn this made looking for side quests seem pointless as all I was doing was adding to my stack of coins (there don't seem to be any unique gear rewards from quests that can't be bought either). Once this set in I was mostly just running through main story quests to reach the end. Henry the main character is funny and well-acted, but lacking depth unfortunately, and there isn't much choice or opportunity to develop his character. Well-acted but a bit flat is a good way to describe most of the inhabitants of KCD (perhaps less so for Henry's two hapless friends). A good game, but flawed.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is the most fun game I ever played (I play computer games since 1985). Story, graphics, attention to details... excellent, but the actual fun comes from the combat. The only games that come close are Blade of Darkness, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and Risen 1 -- but they are just scratching the fun compared to KCD, which, in my opinion, has the best combat gameplay ever found in a game so far. The combat is fluid and super fun, it is quite easy if you pay attention and you won't expect to kill an enemy by spamming a button or relying on some sort of quick-timed-events (like 99.99% of other games do). I'm playing on hard and it is not difficult at all. Run / hide / surprise them, try to put as many arrows in them as possible before using the melee weapons, use the environment, manage stamina, parry and riposte, chain multiple hits... or run away, train and come back when you're ready. It saddens me so much that some people are saying the combat is clunky / bad / etc. because I'm afraid the developer will be disappointed by such opinions and may decide to dumb down the gameplay in its feature games. This game is a masterpiece -- it has super fun gameplay! not like so many other "spam the button" ones. Thank you Warhorse Studios and please keep up the excellent work! --- P.S.: English is not my first language, please excuse the errors.

This game can be highly immersive aside from fairly frequent bugs. I am currently 13 hours in and I am greatly enjoying it so far. Story is engaging although it can be restricting at times. Once the first mission is done you are (fairly) free to roam about. Combat and movement can be clunky but you get used to it fairly quickly, and it goes from getting used to the combat to really enjoying the combat. I highly recommend this game though, besides the bugs.

The game has a lot of character and a beautifully crafted world that serves as a great insight towards life in medieval europe. It still has issues, for some users it seems worse than others but I have also experienced glitches here and there. Nothing game breaking yet at least, from my experience so far and with every patch and update, which is still an ongoing process, the game gets a little bit better. Will it ever run flawlessly and super well optimized? Probably not, but i still think the best is yet to come for Kingdom Come Deliverance and we'll be seeing further improvements on all fronts. That being said i'm satisified with the performance and technical issues aren't anything major for me so far. If you are into the historical period and rpgs, and you also have a fairly decent PC and a modicum of patience i'd give it a shot. I consider my PC to be 'upper-mid range' by 2018 standards. I'm playing on a GTX 1060, i7 4790 and 16gb DDR3. I also have it installed on an SSD, maybe that helps with textures but i'm not sure. Loading times are ok, and i'm playing on a mix of high and medium settings at 1080p. It will occasionally drop to 40fps but usually is closer to 60fps. So some food for thought before you make a decision. I also got the game on the GOG anniversary sale for 25 dollars along with two other good games so I think i got myself a real bargain, but otherwise the GOG price is reasonable, compared to other vendors.

The Good --Entertaining story in an open world. --Enemies are not scaled to your level, so discretion can be the better part of valour. --Strives for realism while maintaining gameplay. For example, you start as a blacksmith who only knows the pointy end of the sword goes into the other guy. You are terrible at combat, but as you train and level up, the combat becomes easier until you can take anyone single handedly. --Gameplay balance includes "magical" things like potions (made with alchemy) to restore your health, see better in the dark, a map that always shows your location (on Normal difficulty), etc. --Historical fiction with plenty of background notes on life in the middle ages and the real people you meet. --Good graphics, good voice acting (for the most part), solid writing with some fantastic parts here and there. --(Relatively) stable. --I personally enjoy the combat mechanics, as it makes one vs one simple, but one vs many difficult (as I assume it would be in real life). Some people hate it, though, so watch some YouTube videos on how combat works. The Bad --Graphics are good, when your card can catch up to rendering what's around you. --I experienced a few crashes in almost 100 hours of gameplay, and only minor bugs, but others have serious issues with getting the game to run consistently. --It's not a big deal, but the game ends with essentially To Be Continued. That's not to say that ended abruptly without any closure, but think of it as the ending of the first book in a series. Most plot lines have been resolved, but there is an overarching plot that will be explored more in a later iteration. The Ugly --Some quests are time sensitive; others are not. Not terrible, but there's no way to know which ones are which. Sometimes a quest will tell you to do something that night, but you can sit on it for weeks with no failure. Others hint that you should probably do it sooner rather than later, but with no indication that you will fail if you don't