The first half of the game is quite good, the loop is introduced, a ton of questions are thrown at you and then it lets you target several lines of questioning at once. It feels like your personality both helps and hinders you and that there is a underlying meta-game of controlling your mood via actions and consumables to succeed at different tasks. Sadly this unravels around the mid point of the game. The consumables become bugged and ultimately irrelevant. The lines of questioning quickly dry up and you become stuck on one thing for many loops, as each loop gets more frustrating. The answers to key mysteries were unsatisfying, feeling like red herrings with little to replace them. The saddest part for me, is that I genuinely enjoyed the emotional parts of the story, but when placed back into the time loop mystery and remembering the original hook, it felt like there were two stories competing for space and one of those won at the expense of the other. The gameplay is what you'd expect, you cycle between reading dialogue, interacting with the world and committing to and ticking off different intentions within the mind map, while jumping from loop to loop as needed or when your time runs out. The art is great, the comic book style is really well made, only occasionally hurt by animation bugs. The sound design is pretty good in that "don't notice its there" kind of way, it simple, clean and fit the setting well. The music is really good, with certain tracks elevating the great parts of the writing even higher. The voice acting is pretty good, not all dialogue is voiced however. I only really disliked one of the character's voices. **FULL SPOILER WARNING** The core dilemma with Rue Valley is that its interpersonal story of Eugene Harrow, the inhabitants of Rue Valley, grief, mental illness and therapy are at odds with its time loop mystery. The interesting parts like why is Eugene in therapy, what are Coral Destiny truly up to and how are they related to the loop, all end up feeling like red herrings, that leave a much less interesting story behind. Coral Destiny had a space mission 2 years ago and all the astronauts died, that's the extend of their mystery. They seemingly didn't do anything wrong, I don't even remember learning what actually went wrong in the first place. The loop ending with one of their rocket launches is just a coincidence. The time loop 'just happened' because Frank couldn't move on from his partner Judy, who was on that mission and left behind audio logs, which made him believe she's alive, stuck in orbit. So the time loop is almost like a metaphor for someone chasing ghosts of their past out of grief, being stuck, unable to move on in life. Eugene's reason for being in therapy is he had a mental breakdown while stuck in an elevator during an important deadline and accidentally set it on fire while trying to escape. The way the story presents some of these revelations was actually quite good, but thinking about the story after finishing it, I just can't help but feel disappointed with how much it threw away.
Henry is tasked to be the aid and guard to Wenceslav's personal physician Albich of Uniczow, who seeks to visit the imprisoned king via favor from the Sedletz abbot. However soon after arriving, Albich becomes duty-bound to aid the monastery occupants as a new mysterious illness begins spreading. The DLC adds: - Story quests that involve helping the monastery occupants against the spreading illness and uncovering hidden secrets both past and present. - A handful of side quests as events unravel. - A large garden with access to most herbs. Great: - The monastery is a beautiful setting for the story. - There are some amazing cinematic shots all throughout. Good: - The story is quite engaging, but ends somewhat abruptly. - The side-quests are tied to the main narrative and are quite good. Bad: - It feels somewhat underwhelming in mechanics compared to the Sasau monastery, there is no daily routine, interesting tasks, no unique rules or genuine restrictions you have to work around. - The DLC adds very little in terms of items or mechanics for the rest of the game. - The curfew put in place, is more annoying than engaging, avoiding guards is dead simple. - Wish there were more quests with side characters. Awful: - Some areas are very annoying to navigate around.
I found this game extremely mediocre at launch, it felt like a competently constructed RPG framework, that didn't do anything interesting and as a result left me almost constantly bored. The writing is abysmal, despite the serious situations unraveling in the colonies the game just keeps treating everything as a joke and it didn't give you any options to take matters into your own hands. You are always required to conform to the limited options set by the writing. As a result, none of the choices, including the "secret" third peace options, felt worth doing in the slightest. I tried to replay this recently in preparation for The Outer Worlds 2 and I couldn't bring myself to even get to the halfway point before I wanted to do literally anything else that didn't involve playing this game. I hope to god the sequel is a major improvement in the writing and isn't just a rehash of what transpired here.
Legacy of the Forge adds the story of Martin's past to Kuttenberg. Henry will find the forge his father apprenticed in completely run down and proceed to join the Blacksmith's Guild to take over the forge. The DLC adds: - Story in which you will endeavor to repair the forge and Astronomical Tower in Kuttenberg, as Martin once did. - A house and yard to repair, decorate and customize. - Daily tasks to earn Prestige (a new 'skill') for yourself and The Guild, that unlocks new forge furnishing. - New gear via your armorer and caster. - A sales chest, where a resident will slowly sell your weapons and armor. - Several new side-quests I was originally a bit disappointed as I hoped the DLC would be a way to expand the smithing further, but the system remains unchanged. However the story was good and the new home is great. It does have significant wait time between each quest, during which you will: smith items, recover looted Guild property, play dice, enter duels and archery competitions, and help The Brotherhood further. There is maybe 3-6h of story content and much more with Guild tasks. The house has probably around 60-70K groschen worth of upgrades/decorations, although you only need to buy one of each, I spend about 40K by the end. Once you buy something you can toggle back-and-forth as you want. The furniture provides unique buffs for Henry. Great: - The house is easily the best in the game, fully upgraded house will let you use all crafting stations in the game and get new buffs. There is also a sale chest where an NPC slowly sells you weapons and armor (20-1000g a day in my case). - The main story is somewhat short, but I liked it. - New side quests are pretty good. Good: - The new tasks get a little stale after a while, but its a nice way to earn money without theft or murder for newer playthroughs. Bad: - The storage chest is upstairs in your room, not in the forge, making forging a bit annoying. (FIXED in update) - No additions to the smithing minigame.
A great survival/builder game set in feudal japan, with some stumbles and poor mid-late pacing. Great: - Beautiful environments. - A large set of buildings and structures to build with. - Customizable interiors. - Custom difficulty with a massive amount of options to tweak almost any aspect of the game. Combat can be disabled entirely, resource-free building modes, cheats and much, much more... - I liked the narrated 2d cutscenes as rare as they were. Decent: - The blueprint unlock progression could use improvement, it feels very confusing and convoluted at times. - Combat can be surprisingly good as long as you play in 3rd person with lock-on. - The user interface mostly does its job after a while of learning it, but it is unintuitive. Bad: - There is almost no narrative to speak of, there are maybe 5 total story quests. - Your villagers have no personality. They all look the same, there is no option to change their appearance, clothing or give them gear. - The Dynasty interface quickly becomes cumbersome and painful to use. The moment you have more than one village, it becomes almost unusable. - Different bandit factions should stay within their own region. Making progression from region to region more impactful and making earlier regions less painful. - Performance is only ok. The game also freezes for several seconds, in the evenings of each day once you have a lot of villagers working at once. Awful: - The raids escalate too quickly and villager AI is useless. The enemy difficulty compared to dynasty size is too harsh. - At some point mid-late game, trying to balance later dynasty needs (faith, luxury) clashes with the base ones (food, water), slowing expansion to a crawl. - Having to set 3-20 builders for Special Projects between seasons is miserable. Trying to reassign villagers back to their old jobs sometimes took half the in-game day.
The DLC is split up between both the Trosky and Kuttenberg regions. Henry meets a troubled painter in a tight spot and naturally begins to assist him in his artistic endevours, slowly unraveling the painter's past. A shield painting mechanic allows players to customize any shield, more customization options unlocking over the course of the DLC. I ended up getting over 9hrs of playtime out of it, faster players may get closer to 5hrs I suspect.
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is an incredible game, a fantastic sequel and an absolute must play for fans of KCD1 or RPGs. The story of Henry from KCD1 is scaled up and brought to new regions giving him a clean slate. Whether old or new, characters are well written and deeply engaging, with a wide emotional range. Most have hours upon hours of dialogue over the course of the game. Cutscenes are expertly crafted to bring key story moments to the next level, be they joyus, sad or horrific. KCD2 has the most beautiful landscapes of any game out there. The environments and lighting are stunning, and yet the game runs surpringly well for how good it looks. The audio design is near flawless. The music is heavy on ambiance as before, but there is a larger variety in themes and mood than before to completement the longer and more tonally varied story. The game is filled to the brim with details, and does a great job at reacting to player action. NPCs can almost always be checked on after quests for closure and following your own intuition is often rewarded, while following the quest objective blindly is not. Every system from KCD1 feels more refined or expanded. Skills have been streamlined or altered and level cap was raised to 30. The combat has overall been improved, but still shares some problems with KCD1, namely: the camera/targeting and master strikes ruining combos. New mechanics like blacksmithing have been added. The expanded crime system is easily the best in any RPG ever made. NPCs can now associate just your presence with thefts, and will accuse you even if they didn't catch you red handed. You can be branded and shunned, as well as executed for you crimes. The new additions not only enhance immersion, they makes the stealth more engaging, while making it more challenging to get rich quick as in KCD1. I think this game stands proudly alongside Baldur's Gate 3 as a true RPG masterpiece, that everyone should play.
Originally was a separate purchase with Gold Edition, but now its part of the Royal Edition which replaced it and you can get it for free.
There isn't much to say other than: a must play for any RPG fan. The mechanics are complicated and the combat can be brutal, but the rewards for learning its systems and engaging with its story and characters are well worth the effort.
