I love the idea of a simple, old-fashioned hack and slash title and this looked like a fun option. And I was partially right, the writing has a lot of quality dry-humor, the graphics are great for the time, and the violence/gore is certainly over the top (in a good way). Unfortunately, the PC port is pretty dreadful. The game runs but the controls are clunky and unresponsive, and the camera gives me motion sickness. There are bugs galore, including one where I Rayne would get stuck and hang in the air, and another where I would get completely frozen and have to restart the level from scratch. The platforming is also awkward and frankly I think a pointless and bad distraction, which is only made worse by the non-responsive PC controls. I really wanted to like this one but I can't push past all the flaws--I think I would have loved this on Playstation 2 back in the day.
Like other quests in this game, this questline is obviously padded to add extra game time. Finished one of the quests? Great, now travel all the way back halfway across the map to the camp area (main "hub" area of the questline) to start another one. Why couldn't the missions take you somewhere that you could organically continue the storyline from there, without all the bother of the needless travel time and setup? It just feels completely extraneous and never fails to take me out of the storyline and what's going on. There's all this urgency in one moment but in the next, take 5 minutes to use the clunky and slow fast travel system before you can start the next part.
Why is it so absurdly expensive to build the village? I would need to grind for hours and hours to be able to afford it, and that's considering the fact that I had already finished the main questline. Why not have some interesting mechanics to actually earn income from the village or get some sort of starter loan? It's painfully obvious they just didn't think this one through at all.
As others have said, $5.99 for one quest (and not a particularly interesting one at that) is already a bad deal. To add insult to injury, the questline was bugged for me, and at a certain point I wasn't able to proceed and failed the quest. Save your money and skip this one.
I've played a lot of games in my time and it's rare that I can't power through at least a few hours of a game, but this one was an exception. It feels like a tech demo that never had time to be worked on by artists, designers, or writers. You start with a ship that has no backstory other than its name, filled with a crew you know absolutely nothing about. The starting area is full of porridge face NPCs walking around in circles, a few of which give you terrible text-based tutorials and the rest are purely filler. Speaking of that, the graphics are eye-bleed level bad, and that is coming from a guy that enjoys Runescape. Most of the missions are complete filler "MMO" style quests of escorting ships or delivering items....they're even worse than MMO quests to be honest since most of those at least make up some contrived reason about who they are and why you should be an errand boy for them. This game, however, has identical looking NPCS that just offer you money to do random tasks and that's about it. I didn't get in far enough to see the main story but I've heard it isn't interesting. In a nutshell this game is basically Sid Meier's Pirates with all the charm and fun sucked out of it. Avoid at all costs, it's not even worth the dollar or two it sells for on sale.
In a nutshell I would say Kingdom Come is the definition of a “mixed bag,” and certainly not for everyone. There’s a lot to love here, but there’s also a lot to be desired in many facets of the game. My play sessions ranged between having a blast and desperate to play more, and borderline rage-quitting and wanting to throw my PC out the window. I only survived because of the unlimited saving mod, which I highly recommend for anyone except the most hardcore challenge loving folks. If you’re a person who loves all thing medieval and can handle the lack of polish and difficulty spikes, you can stop reading now—Kingdom Come is probably the best simulator of medieval life out there.
I rarely get "sucked in" to a game these days to the point that I cannot put it down, but this was certainly the case with Origins. I put in well over 50 hours in a short time period and rarely had a single dull moment. Even at $20 this is an absolute steal for any RPG fan. One disclaimer is the combat can be a bit clunky with pausing to manage your party members' skills and overall combat tactics. I simply set the difficulty to easy so I was able to do most all of the fighting in real time--if you're looking for a huge amount of combat depth that is absolutely there for you, but know you can bypass a lot of those mechanics if they don't appeal to you.
